Miranda Hart plans Christmas special "I don't know if it makes much difference," the star of The Dark Knight Rises and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy tells Mandrake. It is like people saying if you get too many tattoos no one will employ you. I've got tattoos and I'm still employed. It's just luck, I guess, and hard work. A lot of people should be nominated for them, but aren't. Whoever could he have in mind? Swinson's landscape painting bemuses Jo Swinson may be one of the Coaltion's weakest performers, but the Liberal Democrat junior minister is doing sterling work in mangling the English language. The employment minister sent an email to fellow MPs boasting about the Government's achievements. It had, she said, begun a process with the aim of "reducing the complexity of the consumer landscape." One despairing Labour MP asks Mandrake: "Was there ever such tripe issued in the name of Her Majesty's Government?" Rodgers" special Christmas gift Dominic Rodgers's delight that his girlfriend, Annabelle Brice, accepted his Christmas marriage proposal is tinged with only one regret: that his father, the much missed-actor Anton Rodgers, is not alive to meet his fiancée. "I am thrilled and can't wait for the wedding," says Dominic, whose father died in 2007. He was best known for appearing in such popular Eighties and Nineties sitcoms as Fresh Fields and May to December. We are planning to marry at a church in Kent in the late summer. Rodgers, 29, is the editor of the magazine Artworks Journal, while Brice, also 29, works in the hotels business. Dominic's mother, the actress Elizabeth Garvie, met Rodgers when they appeared together in the 1982 television drama Something in Disguise. The series was written and dramatised by Elizabeth Jane Howard, who died on Thursday. Raise your hats Mandrake is sorry to report that Brian Dowling, one of Clubland's most convivial figures, died on New Year's Eve. The former Fleet Street journalist and Rank Films publicist was one of the last men in London to wear both a monocle and a bowler hat, although he fastidiously insisted on referring to it as a Coke hat. "Brian had an eye for pretty women and I once saw him, in Manhattan as it happens, simultaneously lift his hat and pop his monocle at a sassy New York lady about 50 years his junior," says his friend, Quentin Letts. It takes years of practice to do that. Dowling worked for Picture Post and was leg man for Bert Hardy, the celebrated photographer. In the Fifties, he ran the public relations department at Rank Films and was one of the few executives to stand up to Rank's notorious boss, the bullying John Davis. Inevitably, Dowling was fired, but he escaped with his dignity. Later in life, Dowling - who continued to play real tennis well into his 70s - was a stalwart of the Savile Club, where his congenial manner so endeared him to younger members that he was known by the affectionate nickname "Uncle Gally."