Hollywood star Naomi Watts wants to return to her native Britain Nosey parker These days, if you possess a desirable house, you face the unhappy prospect of George Osborne's assessors coming up the drive to value your property in order to justify extracting still more tax. In better times, the Earl of Snowdon was more likely to pay you an unexpected visit. His son, Viscount Linley, who threw his Christmas party at his Belgravia furniture shop on Tuesday night, recalls how his pa often couldn't resist a peek. "My father would always drive down people's drives without asking, because he had seen a beautiful house," Linley recalls. It could be awkward. "To this day, my sister and I cannot listen to the sound of gravel without it putting us on edge," he says. Order, order Sally Bercow, the wife of the Speaker of the Commons, has finally seen the sense of the old saying: "Least said, soonest mended." With legal action from Lord McAlpine in the offing over the innuendo to which she subjected him, and a possible fine for breaching a court order by naming a schoolgirl who had allegedly run off with her teacher, she has suspended her account on the Twitter website. Happily, she now has no outlet for her views since the BBC and Sky News no longer invite her to review the newspapers for them. Even the Daily Star Sunday has dispensed with her services as a columnist. The ears of poor old John Bercow, if she can stoop low enough, will now somehow have to absorb all of her daily pontifications.