Diary: Gay marriage makes strange bedfellows

Artists Gilbert & George who are against gay marriage in churches (Reuters)

Who'd have thought it? Gilbert & George clambering into bed with Cardinal Keith O'Brien? Yes, on the issue of man-on-man matrimony it seems the country's top gay (marriage) hater and the art world's very own Adam and Steve are singing from the same hymn book.

"Who wants to be married in a church? Not us in a million years; we wouldn't go near one," Gilbert tells us at the launch of their latest show at the White Cube's Bermondsey Gallery in London.

Ah, but wait. There's more. "For us it is very simple; our motto is 'Burn religion'."

It gets worse. Enter George: "Some gay people would like to do it as a kind of revenge, saying: 'We'll make you marry us, you bastards'."

Whether the bastard Cardinal (or Bardinal, perhaps) would, in such an eventuality, be required to attend the reception too would, the Diary thinks, be an ecumenical matter. But best get brushing up on those Dolly Parton lyrics anyway Your Eminence. Better safe than sorry.

'Amess used meto bury the Cake'

The investigation into "Commons moles changing Wikipedia entries", printed in these very pages yesterday, draws another furry little mammal from its Portcullis House burrow.

"Years ago I worked for David Amess," types mole, with its spindly claws. Amess was the honourable member for Southend who in 2001 was duped by Brass Eye creator Chris Morris into raising in Parliament the dangers of "Cake", a perilous new drug flooding Britain's streets, which was in fact entirely fictitious.

It is an episode that has not escaped the attention of the curators of the world's largest online encyclopedia. "Taking it off Wikipedia was on my to-do list every morning," the mole continues. "It would be back up by lunchtime, but I was only required to take it down once a day." You can have your Cake and eat it, after all.

A dinner fit for a Tory baroness

It was Michael Heseltine's years in the Thatcherite wilderness, building grassroots support on a never ending tour of tedious and culinarily underwhelming Conservative Association dinners, that brought the "rubber chicken circuit" into common political parlance. But now, not unlike like Lady Thatcher herself, the overcooked bird has been gazumped.

"I spend more and more time running up and down the country going to constituencies," the Conservative Party Chair Baroness Warsi – a vegetarian – tells The House Magazine, as she gears up to oust Chris "Go Faster" Huhne from his Eastleigh seat. "I do eight to 12 a week. You do dinners, you do teas, you campaign.

"There's a lot of mushroom risotto. Mushroom is the new vegetarian. It used to be pasta with a tin of tomatoes, it's now mushroom risotto."

Mason goes for Olympic gag gold

That New York came not within 10 Empire State Building's lengths of beating London to the 2012 Games is evidently good news for one of the city's most famous sons.

"I want to ask you something – why is everyone so happy to have the Olympic Games?" writes comedian Jackie Mason in The Jewish Chronicle. "People say: 'Oh – it's the prestige. It brings such prestige.' London has to be one of the world's most famous cities – do you mean to tell me it needs more prestige? There's about seven people on the whole planet who haven't heard of London, and they live in a swamp in Brazil.

"Meanwhile they're digging up the roads, they're building a swimming pool the size of Finland, the whole thing is costing £900bn – and you still can't get a seat. Every Jew I know applied for 300 seats for the tennis, the swimming, the running, the jumping. Six months later, they got one ticket for an event nobody had ever heard of – Underwater Clapping or Synchronised Archery or Sumo Rodeo."