Seitan’s Little Helper

A lot of people initially thought that Richard Branson was maybe the famous businessman who took out an injunction last week but, despite his creepy habit of lifting up lovelies in every corporate photoshoot, we’ve been told he’s actually quite a respectful lothario.

Back when he was a much younger millionaire, Branson made a surprise appearance at a wedding party at a rather swanky hotel. One reveller, who was suffering from a rather unpredictable bout of food poisoning, was enjoying Branson’s company well enough but found that his guts couldn’t quite keep the pace. He told his girlfriend that he was going to go to bed, but that she should stay and enjoy the party.

Five hours later, he wakes up to find Richard Branson in his room, hovering at the foot of the bed, waiting to ask him a question. Branson began by saying how charming he’d found this man’s girlfriend earlier and said that, if he was at all up for it, he’d be rather keen on “teaming up” on her.

A request which was nixed with the response “No, I’ve got the shits.”

Still, nice of him to ask.

You might think from recent coverage that Philip Green’s top skills are bullying, threatening and swearing – but Phil is also an enthusiastic gambler and, according to some of the bookmakers he’s bet with, a very shrewd one too.

But even in this area Green is obsessed with secrecy. He demanded that the bookmaker keep his identify hush-hush at all times. So while normal customer accounts are made in their own names, he insisted that his account had to be kept under a secret code name: “Cockerel”

(“Cock” for short, no doubt.)

Which Instagram influencer makes people who work for her sign an NDA forcing them to promise not to reveal anything about her use of botox – something that none of her staff had even picked up on until she put it in the NDA?

Sean(n) Walsh’s early Strictly exit wasn’t the first time that his snogging has put a premature end to a good opportunity.

Before he signed up with his current agents, Sean(n) was looking to sign with UK comedy mega-agency, Avalon. But he rather shot his wad there when he went and put the moves on his prospective Avalon agent at that year’s Chortle Awards, which resulted in the pair of them snogging the faces off each other all night (“like teenagers at the back of the bus”) in front of virtually the entire comedy industry.

Sean(n) ended up signing with Off The Kerb.

She no longer works for Avalon.

This week sees the final part of our latest multi-part deep dive, which looks at the weirdly intertwined careers of Simon Cowell, Max Clifford, Jonathan King and Mark Williams-Thomas.

This last part deals with Max Clifford – the dead, disgraced PR mastermind involved in it all – and how he accidentally sowed the seeds of his own destruction, by setting a chain of events in action that caused the police he had once worked so closely with start investigating him instead.

It involves Gary Glitter’s hard drive, two separate letters about sex crimes and a candid interview covertly captured on camera – and ends on a curiously topical note.

[Read Max Factor here]

FYI: If you need to catch up on previous parts
Introduction: Syco Paths [Read here]
Part I: Arrest & Repertoire [Read here]
Part II: Defective Inspector [Read here]

William Sitwell is currently being held aloft as the latest victim of PC culture, kicked out of the editor’s chair at Waitrose Magazine simply for making an ill-judged joke about trapping and killing vegans to a freelance journalist who pitched him a vegan column – but there may be a touch more to the situation that just that.

Sitwell has apparently been considered something of an office liability for a while now, so it’s no real surprise that his post-lunch emails were a little near the knuckle.

Coming back to work one afternoon, rather refreshed after a longish lunch break, he loudly announced to the office “It smells of cunt in here!” Then, on another occasion, he was ushered out of a client meeting for turning up in similarly good spirits (he then used this unexpectedly free time to pop back out for a top-up).

And the less said about his nights on the town with Hardeep Singh Kohli, the better…

We promise we won’t start banging on about Hardeep Singh Kohli again in any great detail (not least because those details were always supremely icky) but we recently documented decades of handsy activity of the Celebrity Big Brother contestant and persistent media presence. You can read most of it here.

We are now aware of at least three publications, including a major broadsheet, which have tried to get similar investigations into Hardeep’s well-known tendencies started but have all found their efforts to report on it spiked at some point because someone along their chain of command has said Hardeep is a little “Z-list” for them.

It’s always said that the rich and powerful are able to hush up unflattering stories about themselves with their money and means, but it seems it’s equally possible to keep groping women with impunity so long as you just keep taking low-rent jobs.

Staff at a big children’s charity haven’t been shedding any tears over Katie Price’s recent financial woes.

The charity in question provides a wide variety of experiences for kids with life limiting conditions. One little girl wanted to see Katie’s horses and play in her famous pink horse trailer for the day, so a date was arranged – until it was cancelled at the last minute as Pricey “wasn’t well”.

Charity staff who checked her social media feed later that same afternoon were surprised to see that Pricey had made a pretty miraculous recovery.

Lady Gaga’s re-emergence as a number one artist has left fans speculating about whether the much talked-about Telephone Part 2 project might now actually be on the cards.It seems unlikely though, given that Gaga and Beyoncé no longer speak.

When they were making the video for Telephone, Gaga told Beyoncé of her grand idea to make a full visual album – her big plan for ArtPop. When she later found out that Beyoncé was working on a suspiciously similar idea for her self-titled album, Beyoncé, Gaga was livid and rush-released ArtPop, swearing that she would never speak to Beyoncé again.

Rubbing further salt in the wound, Beyoncé repeated this whole idea to a more-perfected level with Lemonade. So now? Gaga hates her.

As we mentioned last week, Rebekah Brooks has hired former Sun deputy ed Geoff Webster to create a book on 50 Years of Page 3, bringing him right back into the bosom of the NewsUK family.

Speaking of family bosoms, when Geoff Webster was in charge of Page 3 back in the day he liked to farm out a lot of the work there to his own flesh and blood. Not only did he bring his daughter in to pose as one of the Page 3 girls, he made his wife the page’s main photographer.

Always nice when families have shared interests, isn’t it?

Nic Cage deepfaked into other movies
[Watch on YouTube]

Local News of the week
[Read on Lincolnshire Live]

Text adventure game in which you are Jeff Bezos
[Play ‘You Are Jeff Bezos’]

Donate to the ‘We Love Hackney’ campaign to get Hackney Council’s new ridiculous restrictions on nightlife overturned by the courts.
[More info/donate here]

Great horror movie poster
[Buy at Candice Tripp]

Saxon’s drummer gets nose bitten off by a dog in a pub.
[Read on Wales Online]

Still Bored?
This week’s Media Masters podcast is with Emma Banks, co-head of CAA. She shares the secrets to spotting and nurturing music talent, and what it takes to get them on the road.
[Listen/Download at Media Masters]