Shaking The Royal Sausages

Contrary to reports at the time (except for ours) the world is now learning that the Beckham/Peltz wedding wasn’t quite the fairytale event it was initially painted as.

Thanks to lawsuits filed between Nicola’s billionaire father and the event’s fired wedding planners, much of what we told you about the botched plans last April (and the fight that broke out at a luxury wedding summit over it all last October) is now backed up in black and white court documents.

The tabloids have already pored over most of the fun details (Brooklyn’s ideas for personalised burgers; Nicola’s secret six-figure make-up fee; arguments over Lewis Hamilton’s RSVP, etc). But one tiny detail that caught our eye suggests there’s much more to be learned about the full extent of the shitshow.

In text messages entered as evidence, it seems Nicola’s assistant once sought to console one of the fired planners by telling her she shouldn’t worry too much about getting let go; she was the sixth one the family had been through. The planner said she thought she was only the second.

To which the assistant replied simply: “lol”.

It’s barely been six months since his last divorce, but wedding bells are already on the horizon again for Rupert Murdoch. His new lady has been doing her best to push things along too.

Media reporters say that Ann-Lesley Smith has been on a full-on charm offensive to win over Rupert and family, starting manoeuvres the second the ink was dry on his divorce.

Her efforts appear to be paying off too as everyone around him is very taken with her. The couple are currently doing up an apartment overlooking Central Park to move into. Once that’s done, expect an announcement.

Which superstar footballer is getting a bad rep for partying rather than playing – but that rep would be even worse if photos of a party the night before a match, replete with escorts, hadn’t been quietly bought up by his team before they hit social media?

Now that he’s king, Charles will no doubt command a little more respect from Palace staff. It hasn’t always been that way though.

A few years back, while preparing for a visit at one of his charities, an advisor of Charles’s was sent ahead to the venue to talk organisers through how the royal visit would work.

It was while they were working out the best place to line people up for a handshake procession, that the advisor used the phrase “shake the Royal sausages”.

Has Andrew Tate managed to find the limits of celebrity crisis management? He certainly seems to have found the limit for his own PR guy, Matt Alexander of Repp Media.

While the Top G languishes in a Romanian prison, repeatedly detained on charges of human trafficking, Matt hasn’t exactly been going the extra mile to represent his biggest, best-known client.

There’s currently no mention of Tate on the agency website, Matt has set all his personal social media channels to private (“Chilling away from Insta for a bit”) and is also adding a plea to the bottom of his emails for people not to use his name in connection with any Andrew Tate stories.

Since losing his job at the Treasury, Kwasi Kwarteng hasn’t been able to cause distress and devastation on the scale he once could – but that hasn’t dampened his passion for it. He’s still determined to make people’s lives miserable, even if he has to do it one-by-one.

High on his own fumes after a big interview on TalkTV last week, Kwasi took great relish in tearing strips out of one of the runners there because the taxi picking him up from the Ealing studio was late.

By one minute.

KV writes:
“I was in Dublin the weekend before last. On the Sunday I was at beloved trad bar O’Donoghue’s where I saw Saoirse Ronan putting a shot of Tia Maria into her pint of Guinness.

“I can’t speak for the entire Emerald Isle but I’m pretty sure that’s apatriotic behaviour.”

Know of any celebs with signature drink orders? hello@popbitch.com

We had a strange sense of deja vu reading about Patsy Kensit’s recent engagement to millionaire property tycoon, Patric Cassidy this week. Mainly because we reported that the pair of them already got engaged six months ago at Scott’s – and Patric bought everyone in the restaurant champagne to celebrate.

We remember it quite clearly, because just two weeks before she had been on Loose Women telling the panel that she was done with weddings – and that four marriages was enough for her. It definitely made that September ’22 engagement stick in the mind a bit.

But perhaps this is Patsy’s workaround? Biannual engagements to get her regular glowing press coverage, without any of the hassle and expense of marrying and divorcing. Clever, if so.

After sitting untouched on the counter for years, the National Enquirer has finally been sold – but who on earth would be interested in buying up a dying, low-rent gossip mag mired in so many scandals of its own?

How about the recently indicted CEO of MoviePass, Ted Farnsworth, who was arrested last year and charged as part of a securities fraud case currently working its way through the Miami courts?

He stands accused of engaging in a scheme that was set out to defraud investors by making “materially false and misleading representations”. Which puts him in good stead to take over the Enquirer…

Remember that £3bn bid made for Spurs by an Iranian-American businessman? The one that hit the headlines a couple of days before the bid deadline for Man Utd? There’s much talk in European football circles that there’s less to it than meets the eye.

It might be sour grapes on their part, envious of the money that swirls around English football, but the fact that the story came out of nowhere, was denied by Spurs – yet also established a benchmark cost of £3bn for a football club smaller than Man United, just a couple of days before the bank was hoping to attract bids of £5bn?

Such a stroke of fortuitous timing has not been lost on some other clubs.

Martin McDonagh confirms our “mistaken for Sting” story on the Oscars promo trial
[Watch on ABC]

Memorabilia from Everything Everywhere All At Once is being auctioned for charity
[inc. the butt plug trophies]

Angela Bassett Did The Thing (Remix)
[Catchy house version on TikTok]

An AI keeps rewriting new, weirder versions of the Simpsons’ Steamed Hams sketch
[Watch on Twitch]

Think you can do a better job of sending spy balloons around the world?
[Spy Balloon Simulator]

If you prefer Windows 95 to last week’s Mac OS9 emulator
[Play on it here]

When stan accounts turn on the celebs they revere
[Read on the Guardian]

This week’s misdirected fan mail story: “I’ve Replied To Over 1,000 Emails Meant For The Lead Singer Of Bring Me The Horizon”
[Read on Metro]

The full Peltz/wedding planner lawsuit
[Read as PDF]

The full Peltz/wedding planner countersuit
[Read as PDF]

Still Bored?
Watch all the Fast and the Furious movies, all at once
[Stream it here]