Is Prince William impressed with Keir Starmer’s belatedly forking out £3,398 for his six freebie Taylor Swift tickets? William took his three children to a Taylor gig in June and paid from his own wallet. His late granny would have approved. When Elizabeth was sent a £50 note by an Essex admirer in 2015, her lady-in-waiting returned the cash, saying in a letter: ‘The Queen was most touched by your gift of £50. However, as Her Majesty cannot accept presents of a financial nature I am returning the note to you with this letter and I am to tell you that your kind gesture is greatly appreciated.’ That’s the way to do it.
Sighs of relief from Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak at Liz Truss considering having another go at becoming an MP. ‘I’m not going to give up on this fight,’ she told the Tory conference faithful. Peerages to former PMs were always there for the asking but neither Starmer nor Sunak (who still can nominate peers as leader of the opposition) would have wanted to take Truss’s call inquiring about an elevation.
Donald Trump was falsely portrayed as a billionaire in the US version of The Apprentice when he was actually on the brink of financial collapse, according to a new book entitled Lucky Loser. It also describes NBC producer Bill Pruitt’s alarm at the seediness of Trump Tower in 2003. ‘When you go into the office and you’re hearing ‘billionaire’ you don’t expect to see chipped furniture, you don’t expect to smell carpets that need to be refreshed,’ he says.
When Oscar-winning Russian director Sergei Bondarchuk cast Rupert Everett as a macho Cossack in a version of And Quiet Flows The Don, he had no idea Rupert wasn’t heterosexual. ‘The worst part of being a gay man playing this part is that everybody in Russia saw him as their hero,’ says Rupert. How did Sergei discover his secret? ‘Barbies,’ explains Rupert. ‘Bruno, my cook at the time, had a collection of Barbie dolls. One on the loo roll and five on the sofa. When Bondarchuk found out that I was gay I think he was really very depressed, poor thing.’
A reported ‘assassination’ attempt on Ian Hislop as he travelled in a black cab this week has been swiftly debunked. It turns out to have been a mechanical fault. Staff at Private Eye were sceptical from the start. One Eye staffer commented that an assassin getting a clear shot at the 5ft 6in Hislop would have had a tricky assignment ‘unless he’d used his booster seat’.
Jeffrey Archer rages against dead authors continuing to write from beyond the grave. ‘Wilbur Smith’s got a book out. He’s been dead three years,’ he says. ‘So it’s ‘Wilbur Smith and Humpty Dumpty’. I think that’s disgraceful. I hate it and I’ve put it in my will they can’t do it.’ Was no lawyer brave enough to suggest Jeffrey has delighted us long enough and might desist from further scribbling?