Diary: Let's not cash in on Pippa

Designer Alice Temperley stubbornly refuses to "cash in" on the gown she created for Pippa Middleton to wear to the royal wedding reception. "What amazed me is how widespread that one image of Pippa leaving the party in her dress was," Temperley told the Telegraph yesterday (helpfully, the dress was pictured alongside the text). "But we'd made it specifically for her and I wasn't going to start trying to capitalise on that." Quite right, too – the interview ended with a plug for a Temperley-designed scarf instead. Frankly, I find it appalling that anyone would seek to promote their product using images of Pippa in that dress or any other.

* Early polls put alleged babydaddy Boris Johnson in pole position ahead of the London mayoral race. A Conservative election campaign wouldn't be the same, however, without a scheme to attract an elite group of very rich donors. Hence "Club 305", Boris's new "private members club" for potential wealthy backers, which is due to meet for the first time next month at an as-yet-undisclosed location in Kensington. Membership costs a clangingly appropriate ?2,012. The number 305, I'm told, relates simply to the number of members the Mayor is hoping to attract – meaning their entry fees alone would add well over ?600,000 to the campaign coffers. Also in fundraising news, the Camden Labour Party is holding a "Singalong for Socialism" next week at The Constitution pub on St Pancras Way. Guest speaker: Diane Abbott. Entry fee: ?10. Meanwhile, Lembit Opik was last seen standing at a trestle table on Tottenham Court Road, handing out free cups of tea to anyone he could persuade to stop and chat.

* Profoundly profound filmmaker Stephen Poliakoff produced a fine run of TV dramas from 1999 to 2003 (Shooting The Past, Perfect Strangers, The Lost Prince) and persuaded the BBC to fund his new clothes for some years thereafter. Until January 2010, that is, when a stand-up row with the Corporation's controller of drama commissioning, Ben Stephenson, resulted in a phonecall to security. Poliakoff, said witnesses at TV Centre, was outraged to learn that his scripts would henceforth have to be submitted for approval – which should strike anyone who saw Joe's Palace (2007) as a jolly good idea. Author Deborah Moggach suggested Poliakoff benefited from "an over-reverential coterie of people at the BBC who think he has something significant to say". That coterie has had its way again: Poliakoff has been commissioned to produce a five-part drama, Dancing on the Edge, about a black British jazz band playing at high society parties in the 1930s, to be broadcast on BBC2 next year. When I asked him about his entente with Poliakoff at a recent dinner, Stephenson was non-committal. "I think I better say no comment," he smiled.

* My thanks to Michael O'Hare of Middlesex for his contribution to this column's (only very mildly xenophobic) series of historically dubious US reports on European sporting matters. When F1 driver John Watson won the Detroit Grand Prix in 1982, Michael recalls: "The Northern Irishman mounted the podium to be greeted with the Irish tricolour and The Soldier's Song, the Republic of Ireland's national anthem. Fortunately for the organisers, Watson – ever the diplomat – said he wasn't offended, but we can only be thankful that the Rev Ian Paisley is not, apparently, a fan of Formula 1."

* Elsewhere in churchmen, Dave Cameron nobly refrained from responding in public to the Archbishop of Canterbury's accusation that the Coalition had no mandate for making such deep cuts to public spending. But he did air his feelings in the playground – where such arguments often belong, I find. Picking up his daughter from St Mary Abbot's Primary School in Kensington one afternoon recently, reports Prospect, the PM was overheard complaining to the school's vicar: "I'm having trouble with that Archbishop of yours!" Will no one rid me, etc.

highstreetken@independent.co.uk