Sad news from Sutton Coldfield. Scarlet Whoosabootiful Mitchell, beloved springer spaniel of the international development minister Andrew Mitchell, has died. Scarlet, inset, twice came second in the Westminster Dog of the Year contest, first in 2014 on a manifesto of “tough on cats, tough on the causes of cats”, when to her owner’s shame she was beaten by a pug, and again in 2018 when she was beaten by a Labour MP’s collie presciently named Corona. She even made it into Hansard: in 2020, answering a question about pet travel, Michael Gove became the first MP to say “Whoosabootiful” in the Commons. Some MPs dream of such a legacy.
It is normally the film director who hands out cameos. For Jaws in 1975, however, Steven