Wayne Attraction

Despite a marked lack of interest from practically every quarter, the wedding of Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz was covered in breathless detail. All except a few.

1/ We didn’t see anyone mention that the mother of the groom unceremoniously fired a wedding planner five weeks out from the big day and had to hastily draft in someone new to fill the spot – on the florists’ recommendation.

2/ Those who worked on the event can’t figure out where the persistently reported price-tag of £3m/$4m came from. They say it’s way out. The white tents they set up cost over $1m alone. And given that Victoria has been known to make Buck’s Fizz out of £1,500 Krug in her time, we can’t see them scrimping on the bar bill.

Rishi Sunak has had a lot of shit slung at him these last few weeks, but it seems he’s quite capable of slinging a bit himself too.

While out in the Downing Street garden one afternoon, Nova – the Chancellor’s dog – popped into a flowerbed to curl out a turd. Like any responsible dog owner, Rishi dutifully picked the poo up after her.

And then handed it off to an aide to take care of.

Which notoriously stingy stand-up isn’t content with just taking his share of the box office; he demands that venues cut him in on their car park fees too?

Pop fans on social media were heartbroken over the weekend to see Nigel Farage tweet a picture of him hanging out at Mar A Lago with Donald Trump, Nick Candy and Holly Valance. There’s been a concerted effort from some Valance fans to convince themselves that Holly must have been there against her will, only slinking her arm around Farage and smiling to help grease some wheels for her billionaire property developer husband.

Though it brings us no joy to burst this bubble, Farage wasn’t the only one to upload that picture to social media this weekend. Valance uploaded it to her private, personal Instagram too.

Alongside the caption: “With my favourite people”.

If continuing to pay out massive phone-hacking settlements doesn’t drive NewsUK into the dirt first, it sounds as if the swelling payroll at Talk TV might. The flagship £50m deal they announced with Piers Morgan set the bar quite high, so some of the latest raft of contributors are managing to coax quite a chunk out of Murdoch’s coffers.

Word around the Baby Shard is that Isabel Oakeshott was initially offered a salary somewhere in the high five-figures to act as a contributor on the new channel. But with practically nothing in the way of pushback, she managed to get them to double their offer by telling them GB News would pay her the same amount.

And then managed to get them to agree to a figure closer to the quarter-million mark by pulling the exact same line again.

Popbitch has always prided itself on being the world’s foremost source on the whereabouts and activities of everyone’s favourite goth dad, Nick Cave – but it seems we have a challenger for the throne.

The Hanover Community Notice Board group on Facebook has been abuzz with Nick Cave sightings today after one user asked fellow members to share their spots of him around town. Within hours, there were well over 200 comments on the thread detailing the various situations they’ve seen him in around the neighbourhood.

Most apparent from the conversation: he’s a big fan of Bagelman – a nearby sandwich shop.

Back in his Man United days, Wayne Rooney was called into the office one day for a telling off from his higher-ups. Look, they told him, we’ve managed to kill the story this time but you have got to stop this sort of thing. We can’t keeping doing this for you.

Rooney, looking more confused than normal, asked what they were talking about. The girl, they told him. The one who’d tried to sell her kiss’n’tell story to the papers. They’d half-killed themselves trying to get the thing spiked, so they’d really appreciate it if, in future, he’d stop heading out on the town with Theo Walcott to try to shag anyone and everyone he could.

Rooney continued to look baffled, telling them that it wasn’t him and he definitely hadn’t been out with Theo Walcott. The two weren’t really that close. This back and forth continued for a little while until the bosses came to realise that Rooney genuinely didn’t appear to have any clue what they were talking about.

So what had happened? Two lads who just so happened to look a bit like Rooney and Walcott had been teaming up and touring the downmarket clubs of Liverpool together as one another’s wingman in the hopes that someone would mistake them for the famous footballers. And they obviously looked convincing enough at chucking out time to end up causing untold PR panic at Old Trafford.

Thriller writer Henry Patterson (a.k.a. Jack Higgins, author of The Eagle Has Landed) died this week. Having flogged 250m books in over 60 languages, it’s clear he always had an eye for a captivating story.

Back when Patterson was teaching at Allerton Grange Secondary Modern in Leeds, his tactic for re-engaging the attention of students who drifted off in his class was to tell them that after James II had executed the Duke of Monmouth, he delivered Monmouth’s severed head on a silver platter to his mistress – with his chopped-off cock in his mouth and a bollock stuffed in either ear.

Which tended to get the class back on side.

The most scandalous story we’ve heard about the BBC’s incoming Political Editor, Chris Mason, is from a stag do he attended in Barcelona a few years back.

While he was a thoroughly nice guy by all accounts, he didn’t end up spending a huge amount of time with the wider party, engaging in the standard stag debauchery. Instead, he opted to sit on the beach for most of the weekend where, apparently, he did that old man thing of putting a handkerchief on his head and tying knots in the four corners.

So sounds like a safe pair of hands for the Beeb.

We thought we’d heard it all from the world of horse racing, but the industry appears to be going through an especially depraved period at the moment.

First Oisin Murphy escaped a ban by convincing a tribunal his drugs test was positive because he must have been contaminated passively by having sex with someone who’d taken cocaine.

Then a Kentucky Derby winner was stripped of its title after a positive post-race drugs test (a result blamed at various points on a Covid-positive stablehand pissing on the horse’s hay; a misapplication of eczema ointment to the horse’s hind quarters, and “cancel culture”).

Then a Canadian show jumper failed to get an Olympics ban overturned with the claim that her positive drugs test was simply the result of making a cup of tea in her hotel room that a previous occupant must have dusted with cocaine.

And now this week in New Zealand a horse trainer is facing a ban of up to four years after both she and her horse tested positive for… meth – which leaves a lot of questions to be answered. Primarily, what the fuck will that do to the poor horse’s teeth?

Every non-word in Another One Bites The Dust
[Hear on TikTok]

Gilbet Gottfried reading the lyrics to WAP
[RIP & NSFW]

Deep sea monster or flappy whale penis?
[See on Twitter]

The scowling brunette in her 20s from last week’s Al Pacino story has been revealed…
[Note Pacino’s Shrek phone case]

What’s Nicolas Cage’s favourite pasta shape?
[Read on Reddit]

Adrian Chiles’ Guardian columns have now got him profiled in GQ
[Read it here]

Week four of the American Song Contest
[Recap on Gawker]

How Two Ex-Cops Cracked a $100 Million Maritime Mystery
[Interesting on Bloomberg]

Interactive rundown of America’s highest incomes and tax bills
[Play around on ProPublica]