Stars in their eyes

David Tredinnick MP (Eton, St John's Oxford, Grenadier Guards and Capricorn) is on about astrology again, this time to BBC News. He started down this line in 2009, when his expenses claims featured £510 for software from Crucial Astro Tools and tuition in how to make them work. In the same year in the Commons he noted "I was on the last parliamentary delegation to Hong Kong before we gave it back to the Chinese, where I met Chris Patten's Chinese astronomer and astrologer - it was important to the Chinese that he should have one."

Lord Patten (Taurus, and, in Chinese astrology, born under the sign of the Monkey, possessing a deep affinity with the agent Wood, the planet Jupiter, the colour green and the number 8) might wish he'd established such a role at the BBC. His travails began in October 2012, with the ITV documentary on Jimmy Savile, just as Saturn moved into Scorpio. According to blogger and astrologer Mandi Lockley, the BBC's troubles are set to continue (she's created a birth chart for the BBC), and only in 2015/16 will things improve "The BBC will experience its Pluto half return when transiting Pluto opposes its 10th House Pluto in Cancer. We shall see a very different ‘Auntie Beeb’ by the time these transits are over", she opines.