IT’S not often that we at Insider Towers feel a twinge of sympathy for our MPs, but we couldn’t help but feel sorry for North Oxfordshire parliamentarian Tony Baldry.

The Banbury MP was flipping burgers at a barbecue for one of the charities he is involved with.

What a commendable thing to do. So why were people slightly hesitant to sample his wares?

I’ll tell you why: our spies tell us he’d only gone and left his flies open while cooking.

Being a criminal barrister must be tough work, despite the 10am-to-4.30pm court days. Cases are piled high one after another, irritable judges leap upon any hold-ups and pausing for sustenance is almost impossible.

Which might explain one advocate’s wandering mind last Friday at Oxford Crown Court.

The clearly hungry CPS lawyer, opening the prosecution case against a drug dealer, described the criminal’s stash of solid crack cocaine as “an off-white, waxy salad”.

Luckily, the judge, who had dined at the in-house canteen during his one-hour luncheon adjournment, didn’t give her a dressing down.

Talking of judges, High Court bigwig the Honourable Mr Justice Saunders took residence at Oxford Crown Court for a recent trial in which some of the evidence centred on Facebook, a website with 30 million users in Britain.

Our exasperated man in court tells the Insider that every single person in the room, including jurors and senior QCs, knew how Facebook worked – except the judge.

A not-inconsiderable delay ensued as details of the social networking site were explained to Mr Justice Saunders.

“I suppose one day we’ll all have to have training on this,” he chipped in.

We can’t help but think he should already have a grasp of Facebook, given that it is increasingly cited in criminal cases, and has allowed at least one juror and a defendant to converse in recent months.

Oxford Mail reporters and editors were unshackled from their desks last Friday evening to bid farewell to a colleague at an East Oxford pub.

An hour in to the well-attended leaving do, 15 police officers and a sniffer dog entered the premises on the look out for drugs.

It was a high-profile entrance and part of a wider operation, but when we called the police on Saturday morning to find out what they had discovered, a force spokesman assured us no such clampdown was listed “on the system” that supposedly records all officers’ deployments.

We were hesitant to suggest that perhaps there were so many drugs in the pub that we all suffered mass hallucinations.

Tech-savvy Chief Inspector Colin Paine, who is now a regular in The Insider, tweeted on Sunday to say that he was back at university and trying to write an essay.

Since then, his tweets have taken on a more philosophical air.

Highlights include: “Police politeness is not just a matter of simple good manners – it is critical to being perceived as legitimate and trustworthy,” and “Opportunities do not make the thief, but thieves take the opportunities”.