The Amber Rudd Test

Meghan Markle must be furious that the latest issue of Vogue features such a glowing endorsement for fancy ‘gong bathing’ therapy clinic, Ilapothecary, as she’s previously gone to great lengths to keep that place a secret.

Meghan’s team of lawyers came down pretty hard on the papers that tried to write about her visits to the boujie alt-treatment centre before, claiming that they were invading her privacy.

No doubt she’ll be writing a sternly-worded letter to the editor.

There’s an unofficial test that a certain branch of the Civil Service conducts to make sure its briefing documents are written clearly enough so that even ministers of limited intellect are able to grasp them by a third reading.

For a while this was known as the ‘Amber Rudd Test’. However, when Ms Rudd found herself promoted to the Home Office, those in the service felt it was maybe a little improper to name the test after someone who held one of the Great Offices Of State. So they changed it.

To the ‘Priti Patel Test’.

Thanks to her surprise promotion last week, they’re currently on the look-out for a new replacement.

Which MP should maybe start advocating a little harder for ‘No Deal’ at home? Their child has just been caught dabbling lightly in the drugs trade…

Lena Dunham wrote a big feature for the Guardian this weekend about how she’d shelved her grand, fantastical plans for her summer trip to Wales this year in favour of staying in her apartment and binging Love Island.

It seems to have completely slipped her mind that the reason she’s in Wales the first place is to direct the new HBO show, Industry. Word is that she’s very nice when she does turn up to set, but that her sporadic attendance is starting to cause complications. Without a director, there’s not a huge amount that can get done, so the entire crew ends up being stood down for full days, costing the production thousands of pounds every time she goes AWOL.

Probably not what HBO had in mind when they hired her to create a new high-finance drama for the channel.

As huge swathes of the entertainment industry head north to Edinburgh for the month, here’s a short festival tale from years gone by.

Edinburgh is, by some margin, the most expensive place in the UK to buy a gram of coke. So, in order to save themselves a bit of cash, a group of well-known television executives arranged for a Geordie dealer they knew to drop off their festival rations when their train pulled in to Newcastle station.

It was a split-second plan, and it quickly hit a snag. As they were en route, the group got a message from the dealer saying he was running late for the drop. As their train was only scheduled to stop in the station for a minute or two, the execs had to improvise.

To create a distraction, they had one of their number (a man with a visible disability) pull the passenger alarm and feign a medical emergency so that the train would be held in the station while carriage crew could assist him. An act that the guy kept up until the dealer arrived and handed over the package.

As soon as the coke was secured, the afflicted exec underwent a miraculous recovery – and the train was then able to continue on to Waverley station.

Since losing his job as editor of the National Enquirer after he tried to blackmail Jeff Bezos over a set of dick pics, Dylan Howard has been working hard to reinvent himself as a serious true-crime author.

He currently has no fewer than seven books lined up for publication between now and January 2020, including “Diana: Case Solved” (Sep 17th), “Bad: The Michael Jackson Cover-Up” (Oct 1st) and “Killing JonBenét Ramsey” (Jan 28th) – as well as others on Charles Manson, Natalie Wood and Aaron Hernandez.

And where is he directing people for pre-orders?

Why, Amazon of course!

Mr X writes:
“I remember having to go to a Smash Hits Poll Winners Party in the 90s with a band I worked with at EMI. I was so wasted there I accidentally fell through an open door backstage and on to the Urban Cookie Collective’s equipment. Obviously they only had one song that anyone had really heard of (‘The Key, The Secret’) and I managed to land right on a massive wooden prop key that they’d brought along, breaking it into several parts.

“I thought I’d put their entire performance in jeopardy, but it ended up going ahead as, amazingly, they’d brought a spare…”

Do you need to confess your past celebrity sins? Email hello@popbitch.com

In last Thursday’s mailout we wrote a short item on how Hollyoaks/Emmerdale star Gemma Atkinson had hired a picture agency to trawl the internet for articles about her and fire off a £150 invoice every time they saw a tabloid using one of the baby pictures she’d uploaded to Instagram.

This practice isn’t entirely new (we reported that Molly-Mae from Love Island did something similar as she entered the villa a few months back) but the day after we wrote about it, both the Mail and the Sun ran big ‘reveal’ stories about it. We’re used to papers rehashing our stories the day after Popbitch goes out, but they missed out the most interesting new development.

Showbiz desks across Fleet Street are now keeping an unofficial blacklist of celebs they’ve decided they will no longer cover if they’re going to start demanding usage fees for their pictures.

And Gemma Atkinson’s name is right at the top of it.

Winona Ryder says she originally decided to work with Tim Burton because she felt that they had a “telepathic connection”, but it really can’t have been that strong.

Back in the late 80s, Winona was sent to Culver City to meet the up-and-coming young director to discuss a part for her in his latest project, Beetlejuice. She arrived at the studio at the designated time and sat in reception while she waited for her appointment. To pass the time, she started talking to the man sitting next to her – chatting about this and that. But, after about 45 minutes, she eventually felt compelled to ask at the desk “Where is this Tim Burton guy?”

“Oh,” piped up the man she’d been chatting to for nearly an hour. “That’s me.”

Think you’ve heard all you can possibly bear to about Brexit? Well, if the Telegraph’s recent report of a £100m ad campaign preparing us for No Deal is accurate, you’ve not heard anything yet.

£100m between now and October 31st is more than twice what massive international conglomerate Procter & Gamble will spend on UK advertising over the same period. So imagine every advert you’re expecting to see for Ariel, Lenor, Flash, Fairy Liquid, Swiffers, Febreeze, Daz, Pantene, Vidal Sassoon, Head & Shoulders, Always, Tampax and dozens of their other products.

Then double it.

That’s what we’ve got in store.

An expert bit of trolling here from Camilla Long, but (unless she wants to correct us on this) she isn’t the Times staffer we heard handled Boris Johnson’s column
[Read on the Times]

Enter Sandman in the style of Let’s Dance
[Hear on YouTube]

Miss Marple’s house it up for sale
[See on OnTheMarket]

What do you eat when you’re The Rock’s stunt double?
[Read on GQ]

Extremely gross story about the owner of a body donation bank in Arizona who was getting up to all sorts of creepy experiments with the corpses’ bits and pieces… Stephen Gore
[Read on The Hill]

Local News of the Week: Vain Criminal edition
[From the Lincolnshire Reporter]

Great Twitter collection of famous dance scenes in movies, with other songs dubbed over
[Billie Eilish v Hugh Grant]

Popbitch’s favourite plumbers in Edinburgh?
[Cisterns Of Mercy]

Still Bored?
Join us on Tuesday 6th August for the last Popbitch Popquiz of the summer at Smiths Of Smithfield. Whether you’re a music fiend, a relentless gossip, or just good with your hands – there’s a round for everyone. Bar tabs, theatre tickets and weird CDs to be won. Join us!
[Book tickets here]