Pushing the boundaries
Dirty tricks in Brent. Come the next election, constituency boundaries will have been redrawn. This means that Sarah Teather (Lib Dem, Brent East, Britain’s shortest MP) and Dawn Butler (Lab, Brent South, height unremarkable) will be contesting the same, new seat.
For weeks now, supporters of each have been maliciously editing each MP’s entry on Wikipedia. Moderators on the online encyclopaedia (they do exist) have now put their feet down.
“Wikipedia is not the place to campaign,” says a firm note on each entry. “Doing it from a Parliament IP address is particularly unprofessional. Take it elsewhere or get banned.”
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A reader writes to let us know that almost every taxi driver in Barbados, having established that a passenger is British, will now offer to take a detour past a “secret” holiday villa that Tony Blair is allegedly having built right next door to the one he habitually borrows from Sir Cliff Richard.
“This,” says a spokesman for the Blairs, “is completely and utterly and categorically untrue!”
OK. Don’t shoot the messenger.
According to the local paper, a German shorthaired pointer called Fitz raided an office in Richmond Park and devoured 3lb of sheep’s cheese that was to have been served to Sir David Attenborough. Imagine him narrating that.
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William Shatner (aka Captain Kirk) is not in the new Star Trek film. Leonard Nimoy (aka Mr Spock) is. “I went through the phone and I grabbed him by the throat,” reports Shatner, weirdly, of the moment he learnt that “he’s in it. I’m not”.
Brand Beckham’s assault on America reaches fever pitch with a — no other word for it — steamy set of photos published in August’s style bible, W. And it’s sort of worked. Readers of the Perez Hilton gossip website are particularly taken by the shots of a sweaty, leather-clad David. “God, he is so freakin’ hot,” says “Bababooey”, in one of the more than 800 posts. “Good Lord, that man is fine,” adds “Annabanana”. Not so much praise for poor Mrs B. Writes “Rob”: “David is a good-looking guy, but Victoria is just disturbing-looking . . . like a young and horny pubescent 15-year-old boy . . . and her face looks like a guitar pick.”
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Postscript
— Elton John tells the Australian ABC network of the time he danced to Rock Around the Clock with the Queen. “It was Princess Anne who asked me to dance and then the Queen said, ‘Can we join you?’ ” he recalls. Apparently the old queen wasn’t a bad mover. And neither was Her Majesty. Badoom-tish.
— “As far as the politics of Wales is concerned, as of 48 hours ago I knew absolutely nothing. I now know nothing, plus a bit.” So says Lord Glentoran, the Conservatives’ House of Lords spokesman on, erm, Wales. Still, at least he went to Eton.