“Din Dins South Of The River”

For the past six months or so, we’ve been sending out a second Popbitch mailout each week to readers who signed up for Club Popbitch.

This week, to stop the entire newsletter just being a long list of weird Tory scandals, we’ve put together a taster edition, filled with some of the stories that the rest of you have missed out on so far.

Members of Club Popbitch get a bunch of other bonuses too, not just an extra slice of the weekend’s insider gossip on a Monday. But the best bonus of all is knowing that your one pound a week will help keep Popbitch alive and well during the coming dotcom bust (our fourth since we started, we think…?)

[Find out more here]

The best rumour we’ve heard about the recent Partygate developments (as yet unverified, but “plausible” according to sources we checked with) is that the infamous karaoke machine that Helen McNamara brought to one of the parties actually belonged to… Sue Gray.

Apparently the machine was one Helen found left behind in the office when she took over Sue Gray’s previous job, pre-Covid.

Which Tory MP once lured a parliamentary intern back to his house for (what turned out to be) an unexpected seduction attempt – with the promise of “din-dins south of the river”?

Sebastian Vettel sneakily puking in the club is simply following a grand F1 tradition; the latest in a line of public chunderers.

One Popbitch reader remembers being at the wedding of an F1 bod, where James Hunt was also invited. Hunt put in an impressive performance at the pre-wedding drinks in Gleesons of Booterstown (a posh pub in Dublin’s South suburbs).

James was on the pints there and maybe had one too many, as he fell sick at the bar and chucked up onto the floor. Then immediately called for another pint.

It’s not just on her latest film set that Millie Bobby Brown has been a bit of a nightmare. When she was filming Enola Holmes, a fire alarm went off mid-shoot. As the production was shooting in a building made of timber, the management thought it would be worth their while investigating the issue – rather than just letting things play out with their fingers crossed.

They quickly began to wish they hadn’t bothered though, after Millie BB stormed over to chew them out, yelling: “YOU’RE RUINING THE SHOT!”

With Todd Boehly’s bid now officially approved, Chelsea has an extra special secret weapon on its board: legendary music PR, Barbara Charone. A formidable force in showbiz, Barbara’s chokehold on the entertainment media was such that even her own superstar clients couldn’t outmanouevre it.

For example, Madonna used to have a method of leaking stories to the press using a photographer friend of hers as a go-between. If Madge ever wanted something spilled, she’d tell this mate, who’d phone it over to a chummy hack at the Sun and – without fail – it would run in Bizarre the next day.

All except for once: the time when her (then-)husband Guy Ritchie was seeing his sister’s best mate on the side. Madonna had known about it for a while, but had chosen to bite her tongue knowing the hell it would unleash if the scandal ever became public. At some point though, when Ritchie had pissed her off once too often, Madge told her photographer friend everything.

They duly told the Sun journalist, and then… nothing. Nothing ever got printed.

Why did this juicy, well-sourced scoop end up on the spike when so many others had run? As the friend was later told, Barbara Charone intercepted it and killed it. She “owned” Bizarre at the time and didn’t want any stories of her client’s marital disharmony getting out. Even when that was what her client actually wanted…

anon writes:
“I went to school and was in some of the same classes as Evgeny Lebedev. He always wore very sharp three-piece suits which I always thought was a little odd (since it was against school uniform rules) but he was never picked up on it and we used to joke that it was because his dad was in the KGB.

“Many (many) years later, I was on the train and picked up a copy of the Evening Standard’s ES Magazine which had a story on a Russian young man rising through the ranks of the British socialite hierarchy, whose dad just happened to be in the KGB.

“I’m sure you can work out who the article was about.”

It was only a matter of time before Piers Morgan, in a scrabble for guests, invited someone onto his show who only accepted so they could call him a cunt live on air. It’s not the first time Piers has caused the expletive to be broadcast nationally either.

Remember Harvey Price’s sweary outburst on Loose Women a few years ago? One of the show’s crew once told us about their experience of that day. In the backstage scrabble after Harvey dropped the C-bomb, the first person they bumped into backstage was Piers Morgan, who was coming out of the studio door.

In passing, Piers said “Well, fair play to the kid. He only said to me what lots of people want to say.” The comment struck them as odd at the time because Harvey’s swearing hadn’t been directed at Piers, it had been directed at hypothetical trolls.

It wasn’t until later, when Katie Price started spilling the details of what had happened that day, that the whole thing started to square. According to Katie’s recollections, she and Harvey had walked past Piers backstage just before their segment – and Harvey had greeted Piers with those now infamous words, “Hello, you cunt!”

A couple of weeks back, we mentioned that the reputation management company that tried to use Popbitch to leak Amber Heard stories on behalf of their client Johnny Depp (Hawthorn Advisors) is the same one responsible for stuffing 10 Downing Street with its current slate of special advisors and comms staff.

Perhaps we were being a little unfair though, because it isn’t as if No.10 are the only ones who make use of Hawthorn’s services. No.11 does too.

When Rishi Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty, got hit full-force with her tax-dodging/non-dom shitstorm last month, she hired Sarah Sands to act as her PR advisor. Sarah generally gets referred to in articles as the “former editor of the Evening Standard” or “former editor of Radio 4’s Today programme”. They’re both positions of note, but they’re almost always mentioned in favour of her current gig: partner at Hawthorn Advisors.

anon writes:
“When Peter Kay did his charity song with Susan Boyle, he asked his video director to bring separate DVDs of each camera’s shots around to his house so that he could oversee the edit. At the end of the day, Kay handed the director a carrier bag containing the jewel cases from all the DVDs saying, ‘They’re 20p each and I don’t need them, so take them off of the bill.'”

C writes:
“For one of his TV series, Peter wrote a scene that involved a large buffet spread. Sandwiches, pies, crisps, cakes… the lot. The amount of food wasn’t really necessary for the story, but artistic vision and all that. At the end of the shoot he had it all bagged up and took it away. Bin bags of the stuff.”

Dolphins recognise one another by the taste of their piss
[Or so science says]

The celebrity hairdresser who gave trims to Beckham, Bowie and Muhammad Ali in her garage
[Read on MEL]

You can’t own six or more dildos in Texas, but you can have as many guns as you want
[Read on OnwardTexas]

Local Headline Of The Week: Necrophilia Street Row in Dursley
[Read on Gloucester Gazette]

International Headline Of The Week: ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ writer found guilty of murdering her husband
[Read on NPR]

Baby foxes find a GoPro
[Watch on YouTube]

More early footage of Rhian from Wet Leg
[Watch on YouTube]

Baby Yoda clothes for babies
[See on Vinted]

Why do we “die laughing” – and how did “I’m Dead” become a good thing?
[Read on The Atlantic]

Thanks also to the dozens of you who told us the President of the Royal Horticultural Society is called Keith Weed. If you’re interested, the RHS also has a Gerald Clover and a Dr Suzanne Moss on its books too.

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