Gordo’s pirating shame

Forget pensions. This is the biggie. Gordon Brown is a criminal. Last week, in an interview with a panel of children on Five News (and probably using his special speaking-to-children soft voice) the Chancellor opened up about the contents of his iPod. This included, he said, music by the Beatles.

Now, although this may be on the verge of changing, Beatles music is not yet legally available for download. Moreover, while the record industry has a policy not to prosecute, it is, technically, also illegal to copy your CDs on to your MP3 player. Most of us might not worry about this, but most of us don’t plan on being the next PM.

“If you think I’m going to tell you on the record that Brown has broken the law, you are very much mistaken,” says a top music industry figure. “But he has.”

Also falling foul of a child’s inquisition was golden boy David Miliband, who visited the Eleanor Palmer primary school in Camden, North London, as part of its green week.

After telling the children that, actually, there were fewer 4x4s outside posh NW3 than they might think, he was asked by a ten-year-old why he didn’t want to be Prime Minister.

“Because there are other good candidates,” retorted Miliband. “Uh, I mean candidate.” Very suave.

We salute Jim Paice, the Shadow Minister for Agriculture. The MP, who has a few animals of his own at his small farm in Cambridgeshire, has fallen off a bale of hay and broken his leg, putting it in plaster for the next three weeks. Thoroughly farmerish.

According to a new survey by an inexplicable bit of BT, the country’s favourite word is “love”. Men prefer “antidisestablishmentarianism”. There are also regional variations. The Irish like “sunshine”, the Welsh “cuddle” and the Scots “numpty”.

Hello? Is that the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran? The press office? At 16 Princes Gate, London? Splendid. We’d like to order a pizza please. Yes. A pizza.

What? You don’t . . . ? Really? Are you quite sure? Oh, wait. Oops. We’ve only gone and confused you with Bella Italia at 108 Queensway, haven’t we? Silly old us. Completely different place, obviously. Still, it’s only 1.7 nautical miles away, so an easy mistake to make. Sorry for any inconvenience.

People caught up with Mark Wahlberg at the premiere of his new film Shooter in Leicester Square last week, where he told us that his next major role will be to star alongside Matt Damon in The Fighter, a biopic based on the story of Micky Ward, the boxer. Controversially, Wahlberg went on to admit that he far preferred Scorsese’s Raging Bull to any of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky films. “I like Rocky, too,” he added, before telling us that, if he could fight any Rocky character, he would choose Clubber Lang, played by Mr T. This seems foolish. We’d take Rocky’s trainer, played by Burgess Meredith. He was 82.

Postscript

— For all its liberal elements (just this weekend police caught Martin Sheen and fellow rebels rampaging a nuclear testing facility in Nevada), Hollywood is still backwards when it comes to racial fairness. “I feel uncomfortable with being made an example to say, ‘Oh, look, we are so good to Latins’,” Salma Hayek tells Easy Living magazine. “I know the only reason I haven’t had many good parts is because I am Latin — and they tell it to my face, a lot of the time.”

— Why does Christina Ricci have a tattoo of a lion on her back? “It’s Aslan, the lion god of Narnia,” she tells the New York Daily News. “It was a symbol of my hellish childhood. When I turned 18, I escaped. Like Aslan, I was finally free.” Like Aslan how, exactly?

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Donor organ allowed child’s own heart to heal
• Michael Jackson: Not the final chapter
• Google Street View gets on its off-road bike