Is there waist in Downing Street?

“We’ll call you back,” says the No 10 press office but, of course, they won’t.

This week, you may remember, we were on at the Department of Health, to ascertain the body mass index of Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary. Now, we are approached by a spokesman for the British Heart Foundation, who has been trying to uncover the waist measurement of Gordon Brown.

Sally Bee, a food writer who had three heart attacks at the age of 36 (she has a rare heart condition), is trying to publicise the link between heart disease and a waist measurement of more than 45in (114cm) in men and 35in (90cm) in women. She has approached Madame Tussauds, but as they haven’t done Gordon yet, they don’t know either.

People, so you know, is a slightly snug 32in.

A friendly poster (above) from Hampshire Constabulary on the back of a bus. It has since been repainted. “It’s not been an issue with other buses because they tend to have different shaped exhaust pipes,” a spokesman says. PC Ron Dunster, is said to believe that it has “raised his profile”

The self-publicist and occasional journalist Toby Young writes in The Spectator of an interview with Watchdog (BBC One) about Facebook and identity theft.

“Julia Bradbury asked whether I was shocked that they’d been able to discover so much about me,” he writes. “ ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I have written two volumes of memoirs.’ ”

Pete Doherty, who was freed yesterday from the last six months of his eighteen-month court supervision, after a judge at Thames Magistrates’ Court in East London decided that he was changing his ways. “It’s just the beginning,” said Doherty, who will henceforth be known only for his broad and impressive musical back catalogue.

“I didn’t particularly want to make Godfather: Part II ,” Francis Ford Coppola tells Empire magazine. “I always felt The Godfather was a perfectly good drama . . . it resolved the character and was really meant to be one movie. It only got to be a second and ultimately a third out of the greed of companies . . . They just said, ‘You’re crazy, you’ve had all this success, why not make another one?’ And I said, ‘Well, there’s no more story’. Which there isn’t.” It still won six Oscars.

If only Jack Straw believed in omens. Speaking to the No Plan, No Peace documentary (BBC One, Sunday) Charles Tripp, of the School of Oriental and African Studies, describes the day in 2002 that Jack Straw (then the Foreign Secretary) invited a panel of Middle East experts to brief him on the likely consequences of the imminent invasion of Iraq: “We were ushered into the Cabinet Office. Jack Straw came in and sat down, and the chair on which he sat promptly splintered and he fell to the floor.”

To the South Bank on Tuesday night, to close our eyes, empty our minds and try not to listen to David Lynch, the film-maker, and Donovan, the folk singer, telling us all about transcendental meditation. Alas, some of it filtered through. “The meaning of life is totality,” said Lynch. “More than the most. Smaller than the smallest. There is an ocean of pure bliss consciousness inside every human being.” “Much of what David is speaking about,” added Donovan, most helpfully, “actually exists.”

Mick Hucknall has announced that Simply Red are to split up. “There will be an end to Simply Red,” he says.

“I’ve kind of decided that the 25 years is going to be enough, so I intend that 2009 will be the last Simply Red tour.” Hands up who else thought that they split up in about 1993?

Postscript

— When Lee Evans plays the O2 Arena in London next October, the expected 15,000-strong audience will be the biggest ever for a stand-up comic. And yet he admitted at the announcement of the imaginatively named Big UK Tour 2008 that he is star-struck by the “genius” Ricky Gervais. “I met him in a restaurant when I took my wife out for her birthday,” he recalls. “I sort of went, ‘It’s my wife’s birthday’. That’s all I could say. ‘It’s her birthday. It’s her birthday . . . burfday’. You don’t know what to say. He’s a big star.”

— “I’d like to dedicate this show to Euston Fire Brigade,” Chris Evans told his Radio 2 audience on Tuesday. “Someone here, who shall remain nameless, caused them to be called out after they got the timings wrong for cooking a baked potato.” Nameless for the few seconds it took someone in the studio to reveal: “It was you, Chris.”

— Alison Steadman and Sebastian Faulks appear in One Hour More, a fundraiser on Sunday for the Camden, City, Islington and Westminster Bereavement Service. But why One Hour More? “It’s the yearned-for hour of conversation before a relative’s death, the hour lost to daylight saving this weekend and the £21 needed for one more hour of essential, free counselling in the City,” says a spokesman. So now you know, the clocks go forward at the weekend.

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