Hold the front page: Anne McIntosh is holding a constituency surgery!

Mr S takes embargos very seriously. He respects the convention. An embargo is sacred.

Yet the news that Anne McIntosh MP is holding a constituency surgery is so momentous that it took every ounce of my integrity not to share it with you before the appointed time this morning.

Most ordinary MPs don’t embargo news of their surgeries. These events happen every week, more or less; they ought not to be newsworthy. But McIntosh is extraordinary. Readers may recall that McIntosh, the Tory MP for Thirsk and Malton, has not been re-selected by her association. The Spectator’s Martin Vander Weyer, a member of the association, wrote an account of the row. ‘I have never heard anyone in Thirsk and Malton say anything other than that they would like a choice of good candidates, preferably not called McIntosh,’ he said, which gives you a flavour of some of the feeling up there.

Frozen out by the constituency party, McIntosh is standing as an independent.