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27 July, 2023

British Gas made a record profit of nearly £1bn in the first half of this year. It’s a 10-fold increase on the same figure from 2022, largely down to Ofgem almost doubling the energy price cap for households from its pre-Ukraine war average. Kevin Spacey says he feels “humbled” after being cleared of nine sexual assault charges. The Oscar-winning actor wept as a London jury found him not guilty of crimes against all four accusers yesterday, on his 64th birthday. The troubled Irish singer and activist Sinéad O’Connor has died aged 56. Irish President Michael D Higgins led tributes to the Nothing Compares 2 U vocalist, describing her as one of the country’s “greatest and most gifted composers, songwriters and performers”.

Rob Stothard/Getty

The scourge of the establishment strikes again

“Good grief, he has done it again,” says Iain Martin in The Times. Nigel Farage, scourge of the establishment, “Toad of Toad Hall crossed with Del Boy”, has brought down yet another “member of the elite that scorns him”. The former Ukip leader has already defenestrated two Tory prime ministers: David Cameron, whom he pushed into holding the Brexit referendum; and Theresa May, whose deal with Brussels he and his Brexit Party smashed to smithereens. Now it’s Alison Rose, who resigned as NatWest boss over the closure of Farage’s Coutts account. “Why do members of the establishment keep walking into this trap?” Why do they think “Britain’s most successful campaigner” will be a walkover? As one of his friends told me: “Of all the people to pick a fight with, don’t pick a fight with him.”

The irony is that Farage has always “craved establishment recognition”. Yet since the 2016 referendum, “he has been disdained”. Credit for Brexit has largely gone to big-name Tories. He hasn’t received an honour, “not even the smallest bauble”. This rejection annoys Farage because he knows he is “perhaps the most significant British political figure since Margaret Thatcher”. And in 250 years’ time, when no one even remembers Boris Johnson or Tony Blair, historians will still be writing about Farage, that symbol of the “anti-globalist populism” of the early 21st century. Yes, the establishment can deny him the pleasure of using his Coutts account to buy a “large gin and tonic” at the House of Lords bar. But he’ll have “the last laugh”.

This video of Jaydeep Gohil, known as Hydroman, has been viewed over 80,000 times on Twitter. See more of the Indian showman’s elaborate underwater routines – which include playing billiards, moonwalking, and hula hooping – on Instagram.

Here’s a stark indicator of the effects of climate change, says Axios: water temperatures off the coast of Florida on Monday hit 101F, or 38C – the same level as a hot tub. Scientists think it’s probably the warmest seawater ever recorded.

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Prince Philip in 1987: zip, presumably, examined. Patrick Eagar/Popperfoto/Getty

When I congratulated a family friend for a witty speech at his 100th birthday party, says Martin Vander Weyer in The Spectator, he told me he’d been taught by the best: Prince Philip, or Lt Philip Mountbatten as he was then, back in petty officer school. The future Duke of Edinburgh apparently had one key bit of advice: before standing to address the audience, remember “ABC-XYZ”, short for “Always be cheerful – and examine your zip.”

Jagger and Richards in 2005. Scott Gries/Getty

How Jagger and Richards have made it to 80

Mick Jagger celebrated his 80th birthday yesterday, says Christopher Sandford in The Oldie, and Keith Richards will do the same in December. How on earth have these heavy-living rockers defied the actuaries and lived so long? They’ve been very well looked after, of course. When Jagger needed a heart-valve replacement in 2019, he was immediately flown by private jet to a New York hospital, then recuperated in his Florida beach house and his Loire Valley chateau. When Richards fell out of a banyan tree in Fiji in 2006, a “full-scale emergency team swung into action”: an air ambulance flew him to New Zealand, where doctors drained blood from his brain, reattached his scalp with titanium bolts and put him on a morphine drip.

But the real secret to their longevity “lies further back than that” – in the values of postwar Britain. Jagger grew up in suburban Dartford in a household characterised by hard work, a strictly rationed diet, and an exercise regime supervised by his father. He went to church twice a week, where he was known not for his singing, but for his voluntary work and “a quiet determination to make something of himself”. Similarly, Richards’s upbringing was all about “duty, rank and sound traditional values” – not to mention a largely fat-free diet. He too sang in the choir, and later showed his “streak of English romanticism” by spending his first songwriting earnings on a thatched cottage in Sussex, where he still lives today. Now I “wouldn’t dare” suggest that both are fundamentally conservative types, contemptuous of a younger generation “scared of hard graft”. But it’s certainly true that these two “middle-class lads from the Kentish suburbs” have always been in it for the long haul.

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Pop star Cher has announced an unlikely new business venture, says People magazine: her own range of ice creams. The line of frozen treats – which has the unimprovable name “Cherlato” – will be made in collaboration with a New Zealand-based company known for its gluten-free puddings. In an Instagram post, the 77-year-old singer posted a clip of a brightly coloured ice cream van adorned with pictures of her tucking into a cone.

At a recent reception to mark 10 years since same-sex marriage was legalised, David Cameron reminisced about the time Barack Obama invited him to bed. It happened when the two leaders were on Air Force One after a basketball game in Ohio. Noticing that a jet-lagged Cameron was flagging somewhat, Obama asked the PM: “Would you like to have a sleep in my bed?” Cameron was only too happy to accept, so Obama took him to the presidential quarters and tucked him in. “People are questioning the special relationship, but I’ll tell you one thing,” the US president told him. “Roosevelt never did this for Churchill.” 

It’s Sully, a gorilla at Columbus Zoo in Ohio, who keepers assumed was male until she gave birth last Thursday. Staff had thought the eight-year-old western lowland was a boy since her transfer to the facility in 2019, though they were never sure – males and females are the same size when they’re young, and don’t have prominent sex organs. Sully’s baby has been classified by staff at the zoo as a female. For now, at least.

“Virtue has its own reward, but no sale at the box office.”

Mae West

That’s it. You’re done.

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