Matt Hancock is a complex character who is hard to pin down. So it seems fitting that the ex-Health Secretary will be played by a woman and ex-clown in a show next month.
Iona Stewart-Richardson who went to the Philippe Gaulier clown school in Paris, will be in a show organised by Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist who leaked Hancock’s WhatsApp messages. Stewart-Richardson will be reading Hancock’s messages and tells us that her clown training will “come in handy”.
Oakeshott will also answer questions on stage about Hancock, and reveal new details about the saga. It’s at the Leicester Square Hippodrome, usually home to Magic Mike.
Laurence Fox was going to be Hancock but dropped out. The organisers are still looking for someone to play Boris Johnson.
Minefield of a New York trip
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves was so chuffed with her trip to New York yesterday to meet business leaders that she put a snap of her British Airways ticket on Twitter. It showed
her seat number, which indicated that she was in business class. The photograph was hastily deleted and replaced with an almost identical one with the seat number blurred out. Then that disappeared too. How mysterious. Is she keen to keep her reputation for frugality?
Gas panic for French and Saunders
Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders did an event at the BFI last night to mark 41 years since TV hit The Comic Strip Presents. Suzy Eddie Izzard and Peter Richardson went too. French recalled a shoot in Spain when they set alarms for filming the next day. When they awoke, they found they could barely stand due to a gas leak, and crawled out of the villa. “We were being slowly poisoned,” she said. “If we had not had that early call, I don’t think we’d be here.”
Farewell to Martin Amis
One of Martin Amis’s lesser honours was to be a stalwart of this diary, which among other things chronicled his heroic flouting of the indoor smoking ban. In the Nineties, the Diary revealed that he’d got a £500,000 advance for his next book, and spent £20,000 on dental work. In that novel, The Information, he included an unpleasant character who edited the diary of a London evening newspaper. Chapeau.
Stars align in Antibes
Over the weekend actors, models and a multi-billionaire descended on Cap d’Antibes in France for the social climax of the Cannes film festival, the Vanity Fair x Prada party. Stars at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc included actors Bryan Cranston and his wife Robin Dearden, Jeff Bezos, his partner Lauren Sanchez and Vanity Fair editor Radhika Jones. Models Rose Bertram, Ikram Abdi Omar and Sabrina Elba and presenter Maya Jama went too.
