Royal date at the movies

Everyman leanings from the second-in-line, spotted at the Vue Cinema in Fulham Broadway on Wednesday.

Prince William was often seen in cinemas in Poole, Dorset, while training with the Army. Grandma, famously, doesn’t own a DVD player.

On this occasion Wills - dressed down, with glasses and a baseball cap - had Kate Middleton and a minder in tow and happily queued for tickets with the oiks. As it was 8.30pm, the young couple were there either for Transformers, The Bourne Ultimatum, or Knocked Up. We nearly called Clarence House to ask which, but it would have been a fruitless exercise and embarrassing for everyone.

Despite her smiles, Condoleezza Rice doesn’t quite have the common touch. Glenn Kessler, a Washington Post correspondent, describes in a forthcoming biography of the Secretary of State how she visited a jewellery shop and became irritated with the assistant. “Let’s get one thing straight,” Rice apparently fumed. “You are behind the counter because you have to work for minimum wage. I’m on this side asking to see the good jewellery because I make considerably more.”

How to upset Paul Burrell even more. Among the guests at today’s service for Diana, Princess of Wales, we learn, will be Claire and Kevin Shanley, her hairdressers. They are among a select few to have been present at Diana’s wedding, funeral and memorial services.

Despite the unveiling of Nelson Mandela’s statue taking place in his own back garden, Brian Haw, the Iraq war protester, was not allowed to watch it. Asked if he’d like his own statue, Haw said he’d rather his tent site was marked with a bed of forget-me-nots. He’ll have to leave first.

Jonathan Yeo’s much-reported portrait of President Bush (with the porn and the pun, you remember) may have cost him a place in the National Portrait Gallery. “It remains our ambition to commission a portrait of Tony Blair,” says the Gallery, which already has portraits of every other prime minister for the past 200 years. Until now, Yeo was one of the artists tipped to provide one. After his treatment of Tony’s mate George, it’s hard to see the ex-PM being up for it.

Postscript

It must be nice to control your own postcode. At the Royal Mail’s new headquarters in the West End of London, we hear, executives have just changed theirs. Formerly, it was the already impressive W1T 1AA. Now it is frankly self-indulgent W1T 1HQ. “HQ for headquarters,” whispers somebody on the shop floor. “They think it sounds more exclusive.”

— What does Hari Kunzru, the novelist, wear to work? “A corset, pop socks and my lucky writing thong, which has a picture of Thomas Pynchon on it,” he tells Arena magazine. OK then.

— No strangers to fantasy worlds, Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter have conjured up one to stick out the back of their London home. They have purchased a 19th-century style “shepherd’s hut”, “to accommodate the expanding family”, reveals the Camden New Journal. It will be a “coach-built cabinet” on “cast-iron wheels”, say papers submitted to Camden Council’s planners.

— David Bowie has denied reports that he is to play an evil alien in a forthcoming episode of Doctor Who. Shame. We were looking forward to the costume.

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