CHANCELLOR Rachel Reeves has a 12-year-old daughter and, like most tweenies, she’s probably a massive Sabrina Carpenter fan.
So let’s take a wild guess that it was her pester power that prompted Mummy to secure a couple of tickets to the Espresso singer’s gig at the 02.
ReutersIt defies belief that Chancellor Rachel Reeves did not pay for her Sabrina Carpenter tickets[/caption]
GettyIt was probably pester power from Reeves’ 12-year-old daughter that prompted her to secure a couple tickets to watch the US megastar[/caption]
Fair enough.
And as the senior politician responsible for putting the screws on pensioners, farmers etc, it makes sense that, for “security reasons”, she couldn’t stand in the mosh pit with the, er, great unwashed. So she secured a couple of seats in a corporate box.
But what defies belief is that she didn’t pay for them. The tickets “had no price” she said, visibly squirming on Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday morning show.
Except they did. Corporate boxes have a hefty fee attached which, divided by the number of guests, will give you the ticket price per head.
Yes, the nature of corporate boxes is that guests get invited for free as a networking or backslapping exercise and you’ll often see celebrities or media figures enjoying such a perk.
But when you’re the senior minister telling the country that hard-hitting cuts need to be made to services, and there’s likely to be more of that in the Spring Statement, it’s not a good look to be seen enjoying a £600 freebie in front of thousands of people who have paid to be there.
To tweak the famous George Orwell quote: “She is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with her face toward the flames.”
Dumber still is the fact that Labour’s feet were recently held to the flames over freebie Taylor Swift tickets and the various “clothing allowances” gifted to certain senior members (Sir Keir Starmer and Ms Reeves among them) when they were on the pre-election campaign trail.
Did she learn nothing from that? Clearly, particularly as it transpires that she recently accepted a premium seats freebie at the National Theatre too.
It has prompted critics to ask if she’s being badly advised, but surely, if she’s supposedly bright enough to be in charge of the country’s finances, she should be able to work out for herself that the optics of her freeloading stink.
It doesn’t take a genius to know that, even if she offered to pay and the corporate box holder said no, she should have made a £600 donation to charity instead.
Perhaps one of those now struggling to survive thanks to her National Insurance hike?
GREY’S A HIT, BY GEORGE
GEORGE CLOONEY says he’s getting too old to star in rom-coms.
“Look, I’m 63 . . . I’m not trying to compete with 25-year-old leading men,” he says. “That’s not my job.”
Yet Ticket To Paradise – his recent rom-com with Julia Roberts about a divorced couple attending their daughter’s wedding – was heralded as a box-office success, particularly among the over-35s who formed two-thirds of its global audience.
Proving we’ll happily spend our “grey pounds” to watch a romantic relationship between two older leads.
In other words, George, we’re not dead yet.
ART ‘ATTACK’ LEAVES TRUMPY GRUMPY
APDonald Trump’s portrait by Sarah Borderman hasn’t gone down well with the US President[/caption]
Trump says Obama’s portrait was more flattering than his
ENGLISH-born artist Sarah Boardman’s portrait of Donald Trump hasn’t gone down well with the US President.
“Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves”, he says, adding that her portrait of Barack Obama was far more flattering and “she must have lost her talent as she got older”.
As charming as ever.
The moral of this story, perhaps, is to never paint a narcissist. Or failing that, just make him look like Brad Pitt.
A FIRING HAZARD
AMAZON PRIME is re-running the first season of the US version of The Apprentice, starring none other than Donald J Trump in the boardroom hot seat.
“Tough decision, folks,” he says breezily, before firing whichever hapless victim stands before him.
One executive who worked on the show back then says they had to build a fake boardroom because Trump’s own was too shabby for TV.
Another said footage had to be cleverly edited so his decision-making didn’t look quite so random.
Sadly, as we observe the haphazard governance of the now leader of the free world, there’s no editing tool available to help it all make sense.
SELL OF A CHEEK MEGHAN
MEGHAN MARKLE (Sussex, surely? – Ed) has selflessly launched an online shop so we can all copy her look in our desperate bid to be mini Me-agains.
A £1,070 dress resembling a loo roll cover anyone? Nope, thought not.
GettyMeghan Markle is flogging clothes from other sites and taking a commission[/caption]
Or how about £595 for a pair of “tan slides” when our very own M&S sells a similar pair for £35?
Meghan hasn’t designed or made this stuff – oh no, she’s far too busy shovelling pre-bought pretzels from one bag to another for that.
She’s simply flogging clothes from other sites and taking a commission, if anyone is daft enough to buy something.
Former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter says that when one of the magazine’s reporters interviewed Meghan for a cover story back in 2017, she reportedly snapped: “Excuse me, is this going to be all about Prince Harry? Because I thought we were going to be talking about my charities and my philanthropy.”
So I’m sure that, just like King Charles donates the entirety of his Duchy Originals profit to charity, his daughter-in-law will, ahem, be doing the same with all monies garnered from this latest venture that exploits her royal connections.
OL LOT OF TOSH
AFTER his 18th-place finish at the Eurovision Song Contest, singer Olly Alexander has parted ways with Polydor Records.
“They aren’t dropping me, they just aren’t renewing my contract,” he says.
Er, right. If optimism was a song, he’d be world champion.
WHERE’S CHANGE?
NOVELIST Mary Ann Evans wrote Middlemarch and The Mill On The Floss under the pseudonym George Eliot because she felt a male name would lead to her work being taken more seriously.
Fast-forward 165 years and it’s been revealed that when British chess prodigy Jasmine Paton – the inspiration behind new BBC2 show Chess Masters: The Endgame – played online during lockdown, she . . . posed as a man so she would be taken more seriously.
Sigh.
And if you scoff or roll your eyes at the suggestion that a woman still feels the need to do this in 2025, then you’re part of the ongoing problem.
NEARLY one in three medium-size businesses has stopped recruiting and is putting money into artificial intelligence instead.
According to the survey by accounting firm BDO, the imminent National Insurance and minimum wage rises mean that 28 per cent of them have decided to use automation instead of people to fill certain roles.
And, of course, a “bot” doesn’t need paying, never takes days off sick, doesn’t go on holiday, or spend far too long at the photocopier bemoaning their lot with other dissatisfied colleagues.
COPS’ WAIT
POLICE who caught a jewel thief had to wait a fortnight for him to poo out two pairs of earrings, worth £595k, that he had swallowed.
They were then cleaned and returned to the shop for sale. With, one hopes, at least a turd off.
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