Fundamentally Julie Andrews

What could have caused such a serious rift in the fairytale marriage between billionaire media baron Rupert Murdoch and famed supermodel Jerry Hall? Anyone hoping for a story of high drama, double-crossing and power politics will be left sorely disappointed.

The reason for the divorce? Friends say Jerry cannot stand the kids Rupert shares with Wendi Deng.

She doesn’t mind the older set so much but rumour has it that the breaking point in the marriage came when she excluded Wendy’s batch from a big family get-together.

Especially galling for Rupert, as he’d been so generous with Jerry’s kids. He even gave her son Gabriel’s media company a rather handsome contract to produce the Sunday Times Culture Show for him.

If you caught Kendrick Lamar’s Glastonbury set at the weekend you maybe noticed that when the (predominantly white) crowd sang along to his song m.A.A.d City, they mostly chose to self-censor – refraining from using the n-word whenever it cropped up.

Which made it all the more noticeable for the people standing near a certain member of the Made In Chelsea cast who carried on belting out every single one at the top of her lungs…

Which member of the nobility was caught throwing hands at Soho Farmhouse recently? After security stepped in to attend to a minor flare-up involving her son, this septuagenarian baroness waded into the fray – diving onto the bouncer’s back and thwacking him.

R writes:
“I was in a pizza place in the Hamptons a few months back, waiting for a pickup order at the bar, with my back to the room. Someone behind me kept saying the name Julie Andrews.

“I don’t recall the exact phrasing, but along the lines of: well, everyone thinks Julie Andrews X, but actually Julie Andrews Y, and one thing about Julie Andrews, she’s fundamentally Julie Andrews.

“I felt compelled to see who this Julie Andrews obsessive was. It was Julie Andrews.”

Matt Hancock paid a visit to his old alma mater this weekend for the Exeter College Gaudy. His former college mates weren’t sure if he was going to show his face after all that’s happened recently, but he did – and what a welcome he got!

In his honour, someone chalked ‘Matt Hancock Is A Wanker’ on the bar ahead of his arrival. Sadly, bar staff cleaned the word ‘wanker’ off before Matt got there – but they did leave the rest of it intact.

So it was left to Matt Hancock’s imagination to fill in the blanks.

Barry Manilow played a gig in Leeds this weekend and was supposed to have a local choir join him on stage. The Love Pop Choir were approached at the start of the month and asked to learn three of his songs by heart. This meant cramming in an extra 2-3 (unpaid) rehearsals on top of their other commitments each week in the run-up to the big show.

A week before curtain up, Manilow’s people got in touch again to say they would need to cut the choir’s numbers by a third, which must have required some very awkward conversations and a few brutal demotions.

Then, on the day of the gig, the remaining singers arrived at the arena for dress rehearsal and were kept waiting in a basement room until 6.30pm (an hour before the show started). They were then summoned to the stage to be told by Manilow that their songs had been cut from the show – so they wouldn’t be needed after all.

Nelson Piquet is persona non grata in the F1 world this week – but it’s hardly a new position for him. He’s always been pretty unpopular with certain people in the sport.

Piquet used to piss in the cockpit of his Brabham F1 cars and leave it for the mechanics to clean up. Then, when he moved to Williams, he put plastic turds in the cockpit of Nigel Mansell’s – a little practical joke which nobody but Nelson found funny.

Eamonn Holmes has been wondering out loud why he lost his job at This Morning, saying that ITV bosses never gave him a reason for his dismissal. If it’ll help give him some closure, we’d be happy to relay what we heard.

One of the reasons he was cut loose was his response to the news of Prince Philip kicking the bucket. Despite there being an agreed and rehearsed plan of how to handle the handover to ITV News for the official announcement, Eamonn wanted to break the news from the This Morning sofa himself.

He didn’t get to in the end, but when the moment came he didn’t give up his airtime easily – continuing to stall and spin out an interview with Tyrone from Corrie until producers forced his hand.

During a recent event at No.10 where staffers’ families were invited, little Wilf Johnson came haring out into the garden, followed (slowly) by an exasperated Boris.

Clearly fed up with childcare, Boris turned to a random staffer’s wife, whom he’d never met, and asked her if she could look after Wilfred. Boris then disappeared back inside and wasn’t seen again for a long time. Meanwhile, Wilfred proved to be quite a handful for this poor woman.

Can you guess the AI command that led to the picture?
[Fun game]

Local News Of The Week: Bum Wipe Regret Edition
[Read on Manchester Evening News]

The big trend among New York’s elite this summer? Bladder surgery and botox to prevent the need to piss when they all get stuck in traffic driving to their summer homes in the Hamptons.
[Learn more on Insider]

An even weirder line than “Tom’s putting it in now?”
[Curry sauce where?]

How Leslie Wexner helped create Jeffrey Epstein
[Read on Intelligencer]

Fox News’s ratings tell an interesting little story
[Read on APNews]

Still Bored?
A radio station in Vancouver went rogue and started playing Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name on a loop all day after staff lay-offs were announced. It’s led to some interesting reviews over the last 24 hours…
[See them here]