People
Young Clegg beats Huhne to be leader
The Lib Dems elected their new party leader today and, by a whisker, they went for the younger of the two candidates, 40-year-old former journalist Nick Clegg. He received 20,988
votes from party members against 20,477 for 53-year-old Chris Huhne. Age is an issue among Lib... [continued]
Cable a star at friend's expense 
Writers’ strike could give Billie her big break
The continuing Hollywood writers' strike looks like giving the young British actress Billie Piper an unexpected career break in the US. Executives at the cable channel Showtime had been planning to adapt Piper's provocative ITV2 series Secret Diary of a Call Girl for the States, just as... [continued]
Mayor Livingstone threatens to sue London evening paper
The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, is one man who presumably will not be bidding in the London Evening Standard's Christmas charity auction for Lot 21 - the chance to have dinner with the newspaper's editor Veronica Wadley and the bidder's columnist of choice at the fashionable Wolseley... [continued]
Savoy auctions Dietrich’s dancefloor
London's Savoy hotel is auctioning off 3,000 lots including a dancefloor on which Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier are rumoured to have romped. Also under the hammer in a sale which starts today are a piano at which Frank Sinatra sang, a bed slept in at... [continued]
Mum’s the word for Tara’s lover
If "doing a Joan Collins" comes to mean taking up with a much younger partner, then Joan's eldest daughter Tara Newley (pictured) will be partly to blame. There is, famously, a 32-year age gap between the 74-year-old actress, who was partying hard at friend Dame Shirley Bassey's... [continued]
Conrad uses newspaper to attack old friend Kissinger
Conrad Black is not wasting the hiatus before he reports to jail on March 3. He has used a column in the New York Sun - a fledgling Manhattan broadsheet in which he is an
investor - to attack two old friends who, he believes, have betrayed... [continued]
In pictures: Life of Conrad Black
Conrad trades seaside mansion for jail
Redwood opens rape row with blog blunder
Former Tory cabinet minister John Redwood is at it again, making provocative comments on his blog - and this time his party leader is unlikely to be amused. Redwood has written that
the government is wrong to regard 'date rape' as seriously as assaults by strangers, adding: "Young men do... [continued]
Redwood dampens Christmas spirit
In Brief: Miss Belgium has language problem
Beauty queen Alizee Poulicek, who has just been crowned Miss Belgium, is embroiled in a political row after it emerged she speaks no Dutch, the language of half the population of the divided low-countries state... Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe has dipped into his previously-untouched £25m earnings to buy a... [continued]
