Lust In The Supermarket

0ver the last few weeks, Boris Johnson has taken a lot of flak for refusing to change his personal mobile number. Critics say it’s highly irresponsible that any 7om, Dick or Harry could just freely add the PM on WhatsApp and strike up a chat.

8ut then the examples they give in those stories are always extremely wealthy or powerful people. Of course Sir James Dyson moves in circles where the 3M’s number is common knowledge. Obviously Mohammed bin Salman is going to have swapped digits.

It’s not as though the Prime Minister’s personal phone number could just be floating out there on the internet, is it? It would be absolutely insane if it was tacked on to the bottom of an old press release that he dished out freely while MP for Henley, and Shadow Minister for Higher Education.

A press releases which – feasibly – could still exist online. And which any old email newsletter could start p1ssing about with…

This might sound unlikely, but did you know there’s work out there that Roman Kemp has turned down? It’s true!

Last month, the omnipresent Kemp was doing some Cheltenham Festival promo for Ladbrokes. Unfortunately for him, this tasty little earner unhelpfully coincided with the broadcast of his BBC Three documentary “Our Silent Emergency” – about mental health.

The messaging clash sparked a bit of online unrest. Tweeters lined up to ask him why, as a mental health campaigner, he would promote a bookmaker given the strain gambling addiction can cause. To his credit, Roman held his hands up, agreed it wasn’t an ideal look and withdrew from the campaign – his agents saying he could no longer work with 18+ brands now that he’s a mental health campaigner.

This new stance clearly didn’t last long. For who is he shilling on social media right now? The famously non-addictive, all-ages beverage…. Stella Artois!

Which Brit football manager used to make quite bit of extra cash from agents around transfer window time? Agents knew the value of their players could be boosted if it looked like a big club was showing interest, so they bunged a brown envelope to this friendly manager who then happily spoke to the press about how he was thinking of making a bid.

He never did of course, but some of his rivals ended up paying way over the odds off the back of his comments.

After getting so badly burned by the tabloids for his coke’n’hookers exploits back in the day, you might imagine the whole experience dulled Angus Deayton’s appetite for a good time. Apparently not.

The police broke up a little speakeasy party in Fulham Town Hall last night, but some of the revellers managed to escape and hide in the toilets without getting caught. One of the hideaways was Angus Deayton. Another, his 20-something girlfriend.

In early 2018, the Conservative Campaign Headquarters endured a public roasting after their social channels tweeted out some flashy graphics announcing the details of an important cabinet reshuffle – which were completely and utterly wrong.

The top brass were furious at how sloppy it made them look, so the director of communications quickly scrabbled to find someone she could throw to the wolves. Her target? The graphics guy.

Unfortunately for her, colleagues had overheard her explicitly tell this same guy to tweet the incorrect information, so her attempt to frame him was short lived. Bosses kept a much keener eye on Carrie Symonds after that and, a few months later, with some increasingly suspicious expenses claims mounting next to her name, asked her to resign.

Three years later, she’s clearly still struggling to keep her expenses on the up-and-up. But she has at least perfected the art of shunting the blame onto a hapless chump.

We have to hand it Laurence Fox. Where other rabble-rousing blowhards threaten to sue people with no intention of ever actually putting their hands in their pocket, Lozza is genuinely now setting his lawyers on Twitter users who call him racist.

To satisfy the standards of libel, Laurence would need to prove these tweets have caused him “serious harm” – which, if they were broadcast to a big enough audience, could well be the case. So what sort of numbers are we talking here?

One tweeter that Laurence sicced his lawyers on has fewer than 1,000 followers. Their tweet would barely have had any widespread engagement had it not been for one massive verified account that chose to actively retweet the hurtful suggestion that Laurence Fox is racist to its 280,000+ followers.

So which meddling blue-tick was responsible for it reaching such a damagingly broad audience?

It’s…………… Laurence Fox’s account!

The Young Turks record label (home to The xx, FKA Twigs and Sampha) recently changed their name to “Young” out of respect for the victims of the Armenian genocide. Caius Pawson, head of the label, was the one who announced the new name and it’s not the first time he’s made changes to the business out of racial sensitivity.

During the BLM protests last summer he announced that the office would see stronger processes put in place for resolving any incidents of racism at work. No sooner was the robust new reporting system in place, HR was flooded with complaints… about Pawson’s casual use of the n-word round the office.

Mike Lindell (a.k.a. “The MyPillow Guy”) must have thought his position as America’s premier Republican Weirdo-slash-Bedding Magnate was relatively safe, but Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale is slowly creeping in on his turf.

Mattress Mack is a Tea Party stalwart who’s been getting press attention this week for his extravagant multi-million dollar betting habit (previously, $3.5m on the Super Bowl; currently, $2m on Saturday’s Kentucky Derby) and he’s every bit as weird as you could hope a GOP bigwig to be.

His credentials:
* Helped produce/fund the Chuck Norris movie Sidekicks
* His wife owns four giraffes
* Used to dress as a giant mattress for his commercials

Scandal hit the New York Post this week, with a reporter loudly resigning over a false (and since-retracted) story about Vice President Kamala Harris – claiming she’d been pressured to write it. Who was applying that pressure? Fingers are pointing at the Post’s recent Brit implant, Keith Poole, the new editor-in-chief who was shipped over from The Sun.

This isn’t Keith’s first stab at NYC media. It’s not his first humiliating climbdown either. Poole tried to make a name for himself stateside as the Managing Editor of the US MailOnline, and chose to print a similarly false (and similarly retracted) story about George Clooney’s mother-in-law having religious concerns over his marriage to Amal. One that eventually saw the Mail issuing a rare public apology.

Good to see his standards haven’t slipped.

CR writes:
“Your Tony Robinson green room story reminded me of an episode long ago in Bristol, around the early 90s. Shoppers at Clifton Sainsbury’s were treated to the sight of Tony and then-partner enthusiastically snogging and groping as they made their way round the aisles.

“At one point he had her bent backward into the frozen peas. He only stopped to express irritation when someone pointed out ‘Look! It’s Baldrick snogging!'”

Seen a more peculiar celebrity PDA? hello@popbitch.com

Metal bands fronted by animals
[Listen here]

Want to own Keith Richards’ satin rainbow jacket?
[It’s up for auction]

Local News Of The Week: Poo Gobbling Horror Edition
[Read on Yorkshire Live]

Martin Scorsese’s daughter is quizzing him on TikTok
[See on TikTok]

Headline Of The Week: ‘WW2 bomb’ Found In Bavarian Forest Was Sex Toy, Say Officials
[Easy mistake to make]

Rebel Reel Cine Club At Home is showing Francis Ha this Friday – with a preshow freeform choreography lesson from Broadway choreographer Xena Gushart
[Find out more here]

Throwing a rave in Chernobyl’s exclusion zone
[Read on LitHub]

Interesting long read on the genesis of one of Yes Prime Minister’s best remembered jokes
[Read on DirtyFeed]

Still Bored?
A list of animal rescues the London Fire Brigade completed from 2009-2019
[“Horse Fallen Into Swimming Pool”]