The Modern Kiss’N’Tell

She gets her sources sent to prison, her NDAs aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on and she’ll call you a pigfucker as soon as look at you. So what is there to recommend Isabel Oakeshott as a ghostwriter these days? Her sales figures?

Erm…

The Pandemic Diaries has currently shifted fewer than 6,000 hardback copies. White Flag has yet to crack 2,000. Life Support has just limped over 500.

And as for her biggest hit – the salacious David Cameron biography, Call Me Dave? It’s sold 18,000 hardback copies; a figure eclipsed by a book called How To Make Coffee At Home.

One curious claim Isabel Oakeshott dropped during her Public Interest Defence Roadshow is that she didn’t get paid a penny for working on the Matt Hancock book. Awfully generous of her to offer her Faustian services for free, but – as she’s at great pains to explain whenever the topic of payment from the Telegraph comes up – she’s also a “working journalist”.

So how can she afford to ghostwrite books pro bono?

Well, she has a little bit of a buffer thanks to the huge salary she draws from NewsUK. As we told you at the time, she managed to finagle six figures out of Murdoch by telling NewsUK execs that GB News would easily match their first offer – and got them to double it. Twice.

Unfortunately for Isabel, this super salary of hers might be hard to justify come contract renewal time. Not only has she just given one of the biggest scoops of her career to a major rival but she’s also been developing a reputation in-house for refusing to cover foreign stories due to a lack of interest in them.

Which, as the channel’s International Editor, isn’t great.

Which tabloid hack has a novel way of getting exclusive scoops at big awards ceremonies? He gets absolutely fucked on free drink, staggers around the venue visibly pissed, then prints hazy, half-cut recollections of what he thinks happened – accounts which sit at odds with everyone else’s and are starting to generate some heavy-hitting complaints.

Fans of celebrity wedding drama, we have a date for your diaries.

Remember we told you last year that the luxury wedding industry conference Engage!22 descended into squabbling and sniping when one of the Beckham-Peltz’s fired wedding planners started heckling a presentation given by the Beckham-Peltz’s unfired florist – forcing the event organisers to intervene and break it all up?

Well, we’ve just heard that the Beckham-Peltz planners are going to be attending another industry conference soon – the RSVP Symposium in Madrid at the end of the month. Fingers crossed for more fireworks.

Tabloids have been finding it hard to navigate ever more challenging privacy laws to do proper kiss’n’tell stories these days. The appetite for those sorts of tales is still clearly present; they’re just spread via people sending notes and voice messages on WhatsApp now.

There’s currently one going round about England cricket coach Paul Collingwood and his escapades over in New Zealand. Obviously it’s not well-sourced enough to know if it’s genuine; but, if there’s anything to it, kudos to him for being able to pull off a “two hour wank”.

Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett sat down on Thursday night at PRYZM Kingston to launch the new Gorillaz album with an “In Conversation…” event with Alan Carr. If Gorillaz x Alan Carr sounds like an odd collab, you’re not the only one to think it. The event was such a disaster that organisers are now offering attendees partial refunds to make up for it.

Punters have suggested the problem lay mostly with Alan, who appeared to have had one glass too many ahead of the show. Not only did he keep talking over Damon and Jamie’s stories, he got strangely aggressive with them too and called an end to the hour-long event after just 22 minutes.

It wouldn’t be the first time Alan lost track of time doing an interview half-cut, but the problem used to be the exact opposite. On Chatty Man, he’d occasionally get so pissed doing his whole drinking-with-the-guests bit that he seemed to forget he was being filmed, prattling on with celebs at such length that it made the edit almost impossible.

For many years while they were first getting Pulp off the ground, Jarvis and bass player Steve Mackey used to share a flat in a tower block in Camberwell. Around the same time, Jarvis’s mum would bake a cake for her son once a month and send it down. However, they had a third housemate who was more skint and less busy – and he’d usually manage to intercept the cake and scoff it all before they were any the wiser.

When Jarvis’s mum found out the cakes weren’t reaching her boy, she became very upset about it. So Jarvis and Steve plotted their revenge. They baked their own special cake – which incorporated a few extra laxative ingredients – and then left it out for their scavenger flatmate to find.

Then hid all the toilet paper.

R Kelly was handed down another 20 year prison sentence last week to serve alongside his current one, meaning he won’t be eligible for release until he’s 80.

Was R optimistic about his chances with this latest sentencing? Probably not. The same can’t be said for whoever is running his website though. Not only is r-kelly dot com still up and running (even though every social media channel it links out to has been terminated) the domain name was recently renewed – presumably in anticipation of a new single dropping in 2047.

There have been lots of tributes paid to John Motson since he died, focusing on him being a colossus in the world of commentary. Some diplomatically stopped short of discussing what he was like as a colleague though as he could be incredibly grouchy and relentlessly handsy.

He was also extremely particular about his confectionery. Motty would insist on having a KitKat whenever he was on comms duty and would accept no substitutes. One time, he was handed a KitKat Chunky and he lost his rag so completely that he ended up throwing it in a rage at the producer.

Our inbox was jam-packed on Friday morning with people sticking up for Saoirse Ronan’s choice in Guinness cocktails. If you fancy trying one for yourself, you’ll gladly find a bartender prepared to make you it – but it appears to go by multiple names.

CB writes:
“Nothing unpatriotic about Saoirse Ronan. Tia Maria is a well-known depth charger in Guinness. Colloquially know as ‘T na G’, after the Irish language TV channel.”

SP writes:
“I’m Irish and grew up drinking in Ireland over many, many decades. Not everyone does it, but adding other drinks to Guinness is a time-honoured practice. Saoirse’s combo is a Dublin Milkshake.”

S writes:
“Tia Maria in a pint is a long standing tradition, definitely not apocryphal. It’s pretty tasty – I used to call it Chocolate Guinness back in the 90s.”

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This week’s endless animated AI show: The Big Bang Theory
[Stream on Twitch]

Amazon has a donkey meat problem
[Read on Wired]

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[Read on The Fence]