Diddy has eye on new cars

Is P. Diddy planning to buy a Formula One team?

Apparently so. The rapper made the announcement to guests at a dinner to launch his new perfume, Unforgiven. “It seemed to be more than bravado on his part,” reports one guest, adding that Diddy had previously spent much of the evening huddled in a corner with Lewis Hamilton, the youthful British racing star. Still, Diddy is known for being an impulsive chap. Pink-and-gold pimpmobiles may indeed roar around Silverstone. Alternatively, he may end up with a bling Scalextric.

The dinner was at Fifty on St James’s Street. According to the restaurant’s PR, it cost £150,000, with £100,000 spent on champagne alone.

That’s what happens when you spray it around the room.

Let nobody doubt that No 10 has changed. Yesterday we called with a question about jogging. Get this: it called back.

We were speculating as to whether Gordon had kept Tony’s old running machine and, if so, who had been faster. Trivial, but from such seeds do diary flowers bloom.

“The old PM took his,” we are told. “We are not aware of the new PM having brought his own.”

Does he now run on the spot?

“Maybe.”

Billie Jean King, the veteran tennis player turned social conscience, visited the Lords and Commons Tennis Club yesterday to drum up support for a new British tennis foundation. She was invited by Baroness Billingham, the club’s captain and chair and no mean player herself, who boasts David Cameron among her tennis partners. “He is very feisty,” says the Labour peer. “It’s all rackets flying about and I like him all the more for it.”

What to do when your MP bogs off to the other side of the Commons, shortly before you are due to honour him with a dinner marking his 20 years in Parliament? The Tories of Grantham & Stamford have found themselves in just this situation, having been cruelly abandoned when Quentin Davies stumbled out of his socialist closet and into the arms of Gordon Brown. With stoicism they have decided to go ahead regardless. They just aren’t inviting him.

Perhaps the BBC doesn’t pay its stars quite as well as everybody thought. A People spy reports a sighting of Andrew Marr, the BBC’s polymath, making a restrained fuss in the Richmond branch of HMV on discovering that his CD of the Twang’s Love It When I Feel Like This (Bonus Edition) was not, in fact, part of a three-for-two deal.

Postscript

— Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister (do we need that yet?), tells pupils at a Sedgefield school that his Comic Relief sketch with Catherine Tate was among the most terrifying tasks of his premiership. “I thought, ‘I cannot do this’ . . . Earlier in the day I was dealing with world events and then this came up. It was very strange.” Can someone tell him he doesn’t need to do this sort of thing any more?

— The artist formerly and once again known as Prince claims that his current LA concerts will be his last in the “town”, reports the New York Post. But hoteliers may not miss him. “He made the hotel recarpet the penthouse in white shag and place a huge purple Prince logo on one of the walls,” a Post source reports.