The Second Serve // Hedge Case

First Trump gets indicted. Then Boris resigns. Now – to cap off a whirlwind weekend – Silvio Berlusconi has gone and popped his clogs too.

As brazen as Trump and Boris can both be, Berlusconi really was in a league of his own. Gordon Brown has been known to tell a story about how he was once approached at a G20 meeting by Berlusconi, who singled him out specifically to ask a very important question.

Something related to the catastrophic global economic downturn? Seeking advice on how to take over from a Prime Minister who had lost the trust of the nation? Erm, no.

Berlusconi wanted to know if Brown could get him Naomi Campbell’s phone number.

As Edward Enninful steps down from Vogue, rumours are ablaze that this has come about as a result of some feud with long-reigning ice queen Anna Wintour. We do know he caused some complications when he went out on the media rounds to promote his memoir last year.

In interviews, he told the story of how – on his first day at Vogue House – he had been racially profiled at the front desk and asked to enter the building via the goods entrance. Illustrative though that incident might have been of the discrimination Enninful was no doubt subject to in the fashion world, when people at Condé Nast looked into that shocking incident they found there was a little more to the story.

While they discovered that Enninful had indeed been asked to enter the building via the goods entrance that day, he wasn’t the only one. The lifts had been playing up and a bunch of people were sent on the same diversion.

So while his story was true, it wasn’t the whole truth. Though as any good editor knows, that’s not necessarily what sells…

One of the big celeb stories in both the Sun and the Mail on Sunday this weekend was BRITNEY ON METH! (or, as it was helpfully described for Mail readers, “the Breaking Bad drug”).

An explosive story if true, but there’s a few good reasons to be suspicious. First of all, Britney’s ex Kevin Federline (quoted in the piece) has been back-tracking furiously since the story broke, like his $40,000 a month in child support payments depended on it.

Maybe more importantly, the journalist who was bylined on the piece is Daphne Barak, whose scoop-getting credentials are highly questionable. You maybe remember Daphne from earlier this year as the journalist who landed TalkTV’s exclusive interview with famed child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

What wasn’t made clear at the time is that Daphne and Ghislaine are actually old friends. Nor did TalkTV mention that Daphne was also one of the co-creators of an absolutely bizarre Ghislaine Maxwell NFT series that had been minted to [sic] “give a fair chance because up until now ‘presumption of innocence’ clause has been underminded due to a ‘crack’ in the US Constitution or some other malice, perhaps!”

[Take a look at them]

We’re still trying to get to the bottom of Daphne Barak’s whole weird deal, but one interesting thing about her is that she always works in tandem with her videographer/business partner, Erbil Gunasti – who was formerly a press officer for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Every time Daphne hawks one of her sensational scoops around the newsrooms, they tend to come with a condition. For a tabloid to land one of her A-list stories they also have agree to run one of Erbil’s opinion columns as well, which are invariably about what a powerhouse Turkey is, what a cool guy Erdoğan is and why people should listen to Donald Trump more.

Crispin Odey is the latest public figure to be outed as a longstanding sexual menace, with some solid reporting from the Financial Times last week about the breadth of his inappropriate behaviour with former colleagues and associates.

Naturally an august publication like the FT wouldn’t dabble in some of the muckier accusations that have been levelled at him since – but we would.

Odey once got ejected from 5 Hertford Street for fingering two Russian ladies in the upstairs bar there. And once tried to get off with the daughter of a friend at her birthday party.

We know it won’t come as news to you that some of the rock stars with the roughest reputations are actually sweethearts deep down, but someone who used to conduct interviews for a certain chart music show on telly was telling us recently about some of their favourites.

Johnny Rotten “We met him in his hotel room and he was the only one in two years of doing the show who said help yourself to the mini bar. He was absolutely charming when he wasn’t bitching about the Queen.”

Iron Maiden “We went to interview them during a photoshoot where they were posing aggressively and doing the full 80s metaller thing, including swearing at the poor, long-suffering roadies. As soon as the photos were done, Bruce turns round and offers the visiting camera crew a cup of tea in the sweetest, most innocuous voice.”

As always, we’ve got a new slate of music quizzes for you to kill a few minutes each day. For this first one of the week, we’ve gone back to the Desert Island Discs list and picked out ten songs that various celebrities have said they want to be cast away with.

So as well as getting your ten points for identifying the ten songs, and your ten points for naming the ten artists, today you can give yourself another ten points if you correctly mix and match the celebrity names with the songs that they picked.

[Play it here]

Matt Hancock’s TikTok is even more embarrassing than you’re thinking
[See for yourself]

Want to rent Ben Fogle’s place?
[Snoop around the listing]

The full Trump indictment
[Read it here]