A fortnight since I noted high-profile biographer Tom Bower was turning attention to Nigel Farage after his latest scathing account of Harry and Meghan, it seems he won’t be lacking in competition. At least three unauthorised Farage books are now in the pipeline for later this year, with investigative journalists Miles Goslett and John Sweeney also understood to be working on rival offerings. Hat tip to former BBC Newsnight political editor Michael Crick, who released his own biography on the Reform UK leader four years ago. “Meanwhile, you can still buy mine, which was reviewed pretty favourably,” he eagerly adds.
It’s fair to say Nigel wasn’t a fan...
As West Ham battle to avoid relegation from the Premier League, one-time celebrity supporter David Essex confesses he’s fallen out of love with the East London club.
The veteran pop heartthrob, who also played for West Ham juniors, blames the Hammers’ 2016 move from their old Upton Park home to the nearby London Stadium, originally built for the Olympics. “I’ve gone off it since they’ve been at that big stadium, the Olympics place,” he complains.
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Hazily recalling 18 months spent in County Cork, Ireland, when wed to first wife Oriole Leitch in the early 1990s, reformed hellraiser Shaun Ryder admits his own disruptive efforts were eclipsed by fellow resident Oliver Reed at the time.
“Every time I’d walk in a pub, Oliver had just been in,” the Happy Mondays frontman chuckles. “Somebody [would have] kicked off, or he kicked off with somebody.”
Mr Reed eventually departed for the great bar in the sky following a drinking contest with British sailors in 1999.
Should visitors to London’s Regent’s Park last Sunday have been startled by the sight of Gyles Brandreth bounding about in the bushes, the eccentric polymath clarifies he and family members were honouring an annual Easter egg hunt tradition, first started by his parents in 1958.
Needless to say, shameless name-dropper Gyles maintains he’s on first name terms with the Easter Bunny.
Turning 60 this week, bubbly wildlife presenter Michaela Strachan wasted no time embracing the perks of age.
These days based in Cape Town, South Africa (where the state pension for women is 60), she giddily announces hours after flying back to London: "I did actually go to [wildlife sanctuary] World of Birds - literally, on the morning of my birthday. I got my first pensioner’s ticket!"
Battling against the modern way of things, film veteran Bill Nighy, 76, now snaps: “I’ve retired from Zoom! I don’t care who you are, we are never going to meet on Zoom again.”
Over 50 years since Fawlty Towers first graced screens, John Cleese is returning to where it all began.
I hear the comedy legend is expected to be in the audience next week when the touring Fawlty Towers stage show, starring Danny Bayne as Basil, arrives in Torquay. The original TV show was memorably set in the Devon seaside town after Cleese was inspired by the cranky antics of real-life Torquay hotelier Donald Sinclair.
