The Second Serve // Giving The Finger

We weren’t sure which Boris Johnson story would be best to revisit when the Vote Of No Confidence was inevitably called – so our thanks to diners at Morito in Hackney for making it an easy choice.

Boris paid a visit to that restaurant yesterday lunchtime and was roundly booed by everyone there. According to multiple reports, the PM gave diners “the finger” before leaving.

Of course, Popbitch readers will know it’s not the first time Boris has given the finger to a diner in a London restaurant at lunchtime. In fact, one of the very first scandals of his tenure, back in the summer of 2019, was about precisely that.

Remember the screaming match between him and Carrie that resulted in the police turning up to their flat? It’s thought to have been sparked because of a lunch date Boris had been on in Olivocarne with another woman. One which continued while the restaurant closed between lunch and dinner, where Boris and his companion were left alone to enjoy a little after-dinner entertainment on one of the banquettes there.

Every time a new honours list drops we cast a quick eye over it to see if there’s anything we can share with you about the various celebs who are ascending to Establishment status.

One of the best things we’ve heard recently is that Gregg Wallace (now MBE) is a real try-hard trivia buff. Whenever a topic of conversation comes up that he reckons he can really shine at, he’ll excuse himself to the toilet for five minutes where he’ll go and inhale the Wikipedia page on it, then return – whereupon he parrots back all the information he’s just read.

Last time Diana Ross announced she’d be playing a big gig here in the UK (Glastonbury, Legends Slot) we listed some of her maddest diva behaviour. Now that she’s played the Platinum Jubilee, here’s some of the others we left out.

* Upon waking, Ms Ross requires a choice of 15 of her daytime wigs laid out for her.

* Before she will get on a plane, her assistant has to go on first and clean her seat with disinfectant.

* She will only eat food if it has first been cut into tiny pieces.

* Her freshly-squeezed orange juice must not contain any pips. A chef was fired for once letting one get into her glass.

Most of the headlines to have come from Liam Payne’s interview with Logan Paul have been about One Direction beef, but there’s actually a hugely revealing portrait of fame and life in a band as a teenager buried in there (if you can put his manner, delivery and occasional Partridgeism to one side).

The part where he explains how he spent his formative years holed up in hotel rooms by the record label / management, waiting to be shepherded from place to place all sounded very familiar.

We remember one of S Club once telling us how miserable it all could be. The night that stuck in their mind was the Brit Awards, when they won. It’s a night you’d think would be among the happiest of any young popstar – but not so. Mostly because they turned up, spent all of 15 minutes there navigating the venue and picking up their award, before being ushered back into a car and getting shuttled straight on to their next engagement.

[Watch Liam on YouTube]

Last month, we told you that London members’ club Blacks had been bought out by a bunch of tech types looking to transform it into the “first crypto club in the world”.

And who have the new owners roped in to help them blaze this new trail? Which tech-savvy Midas is going to help them turn the tide of the current crypto-crash to make this a resounding hi-tech success?

None other than the brains behind the revolutionary Matt Hancock app… Matt Hancock!

X writes:
“Actor Keith Allen was best mates with Damien Hirst for a long time. A woman Keith once invited to his home recognised a few famous works on his walls, including his famous spirograph pictures which Allen confirmed were ‘Yes, all Damien originals.’

“Later the woman was in Allen’s ensuite bathroom where she was enchanted by two old-fashioned medicine cabinets with intriguing things in them like really ancient razors, pill packets and other odds and sods. She was enjoying rummaging through the cabinets picking up all the strange pharmacy stuff when suddenly the door opened as Allen was wondering why she was taking so long.

“Seeing the open cabinets and her holding something out of them he went pale, swore and informed her that there were in fact Damien Hirst art installations worth several million pounds. She deduced later they were probably moved from Hirst’s famous Pharmacy restaurant after it closed.

“A Damien Hirst team had painstakingly recreated the medicine cabinets exactly as their master had instructed – every object in them placed perfectly – only she had now had haphazardly ruined the whole bloody set up.

“The evening went somewhat downhill afterwards…”

With Beergate still dangling over Keir Starmer’s head, the Tories aren’t the only ones toying with a potential change in leadership. One of the MPs who has been gearing up to take over if Sir Keir falls on his sword is Wes Streeting, and we can expect some pretty saucy campaigning tactics from him if it comes to it.

According to an old issue of the Cambridge student newspaper Varsity, when Wes ran for president of the student union, he won by the narrowest of margins (22 votes). The reason given for him clinching it? One of his final efforts was to send a team of 30-odd campaigners to various club nights around Cambridge, “outrageously dressed” with ‘Wes For Pres’ stickers across their tits and arses.

Last week saw something of a theme, with audio rounds based around the numbers Five, Four, Three and Two. Today we finish it off with a round dedicated to One – but there’s going to be a daily quiz up for each weekday on various themes.

You get a point for identifying each song title and another point for each performing artist. There’s ten songs per quiz; twenty points in total.

Today’s theme: Ones

[Play it here]

Interesting thoughts from music historian Ted Giola, who reckons record labels are digging their own graves with their TikTok obsession
[Full story here]

Running Up That Hill is back in the Top 10 off the back of Stranger Things – but chart expert James Masterton points out that if the track wasn’t subject to ACR (where old songs only get a fraction of the streams of new songs) it would have been number two in singles chart this week…
[Full story here]

Headline Of The Week: “Alan Cummings’ Missing Co-Star Chimp Was Found Alive After His Owner Faked His Death As Part Of A Longstanding Battle With PETA”
[Read on Rolling Stone]

The Adam Curtis Jubilee
[See on Twitter]