House beat for Blur drummer

Dave Rowntree, the drummer from Blur, is hoping to become an MP. The musician, we hear, is putting his name forward to be the next Labour candidate in the very safe Labour seat of Liverpool West Derby.

Rowntree stood unsuccessfully in the Westminster council elections in May.

He faces a stiff fight. The current MP, the 76-year-old serial rebel Bob Wareing, is furious at having to face a reselection battle, alleging a Downing Street plot. Tristram Hunt, the historian, is also in the running. Pole position, however, is occupied by Stephen Twigg, who ousted Michael Portillo in Enfield Southgate in 1997. As an Islington-based Oxbridge graduate, he is said to be Downing Street’s clear favourite. Quelle surprise.

At the launch of the new Blondie musical (to be called Desperately Seeking Susan ), at Sketch in London, the band’s representatives were keen to emphasise that, as ever, there is still more to Blondie than merely Debbie Harry.

“Please ask Chris Stein a question,” a stressed PR woman implores People, indicating the rather bored-looking guitarist. “They wrote the songs together!”

Stein, however, doesn’t seem too bothered. “I have a very low tolerance for musical theatre,” he says.

Twice.

Daniel Radcliffe has a rather ingenious strategy for avoiding the paparazzi. Speaking on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on NBC, he revealed that, whenever he leaves a film set, he ensures that he is always wearing exactly the same clothes. New photographs are thus identical to old ones, so nobody bothers.

Many commentators have totted up the number of appearances of various words in Alastair Campbell’s new book, including 135 instances of the f-word, and 38 of the sh-word.

We, however, were more interested to spot the thoroughly unusual “discombobulated” five times. Had he made some kind of bet?

Many sightings of Cherie Blair in a boutique clothes shop near her new home in Connaught Square. Is she seeking a new look or just meeting the neighbours?

Neither. Annmarie McDonald, owner of Crimson in Connaught Village, has simply replaced the heads of all of her mannequins with cut-outs of Cherie’s face.

“Loads of people really like the display!” she gushes. “There is an event at the end of August to which she will be receiving an invitation, but that doesn’t mean she’ll come. I hope she does!” Depends on the freebies, we’d suppose.

“End-to-end digital workflow – in other words, one seamless, solid-state process from idea and initial capture of material in the field or the studio, all the way through production, postproduction, transmission, exploitation and archiving.” The BBC’s Mark Thompson, talking about the future, yesterday. What?

Nick Ross, the recently sacked and not-at-all-bitter Crimewatch presenter, has called for the licence fee to be scrapped. “It is absurd in a multi-channel age to be charged a tax to watch a few channels or listen to a few radio stations,” he tells Hello! Perhaps worse than absurd. Criminal, even. No? Nick?

Not a good day for Grant Shapps, MP (Welwyn Hatfield, C). Shapps, presently helping the Tory effort in the Ealing Southall by-election, appeared to have logged on to the Liberal Democrats’ local YouTube page and pretended to be one of them, commiserating on their impending defeat, and seemingly forgetting that he was logged in under his own usual YouTube account, under the login name “GrantShapps”. Following much ridicule, Conservative Central Office now insists that Shapps was innocent and his account was hacked. By whom? Why?

Postscript

— “Why,” bellows Annie Lennox after last weekend’s Live Earth concert, “don’t the media draw attention to the urgent need for action, instead of reducing [Live Earth] to bitchy pieces? It's so easy to criticise people for being hypocritical,” she concludes rhetorically, “but what’s the point?”

— “A friend of mine said, ‘There’s a part in this book you’ve got to play’,” says Imelda Staunton, speaking at the Hollywood screening of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. “So I looked it up and it’s a short, fat, ugly toad-like woman. Perfect casting, they said. Thanks, thanks.”

— What is the suave new Foreign Secretary’s favourite restaurant? “Colmans Fish and Chips in South Shields,” David Miliband tells Waitrose Food Illustrated, adding hastily: “I order the sustainable haddock and chips with mushy peas.” Is there really a chippy in South Shields with the words “sustainable haddock” on the menu?

— Benazir Bhutto, twice Prime Minister of Pakistan, is promoting her autobiography in London. Bhutto, who left Pakistan mired in allegations of corruption and with her life in grave danger, remains undaunted, chirping, “Everywhere I go, people ask, when are you going back?” Rude, really.

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