Not smoking becomes a drag

There is no denial like smoker denial. According to various reports, brave Prince Hal has returned from Afghanistan older and wiser and cigarette-free. Oh yes?

“I’d seen him in the papers with a cigarette,” recalled Sergeant Dean Barnes, who spent time with Widow Six Seven in Helmand province. “It was all top secret when he arrived here and we didn’t have a clue. He came around chatting to us all and he was a nice bloke. He tried to put across that he was a non-smoker before he started asking us for cigarettes. He still owes us a few.” Apparently, Sergeant-Major Mark Curry and Sergeant Alan Bridges also provided the Prince with cigarettes.

Harry is now on holiday in Botswana. Duty-free fags are pretty cheap there.

Above, doormen at a London hotel shield Burt Reynolds from photographers, perhaps making the eternal toddler mistake of assuming that, if he cannot see them, they cannot see him either.

Scarlett Johansson is auctioning her affections at the premiere of her forthcoming film, He’s Just not that into You , for Oxfam on eBay. Are you the person who has bid $40,100 (£19,828) for the “date”? If so, we hope you’ve read the small print that points out that the “date” is only a “meet and greet” and, “due to Scarlett’s schedule” a brief one. This is not an Eliot Spitzer situation.

A Downing Street spokesman has responded to a 322-strong petition calling for Lemmy, the frontman of 1970s rock band Motörhead to be knighted. “Lemmy’s achievements in music are well known and respected,” writes a spokesman. “Your support has been carefully noted.” And yet, on the 1,887 people who suggest the same honour for Ringo Starr, not a whisper. A shameful rock bias.

If you never saw the last episode of The Sopranos, don’t read on, but rumours wafting out of America suggest that nothing happened in that diner. Nick D’Urso, manager of Satin Dolls, the location for the infamous Bada Bing club, said renovations have been put on hold after he received a call regarding a future film. His “vow of omerta” forbids him to say more.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is in touch, citing recent refurbishments as the cause of its £46,000 pot-plant expenditure (People, yesterday). “We are only too happy to be compared to Elton John in terms of style, creativity and success,” says a spokesman, “but on the issue of horticultural expenditure do not think the comparison is entirely justified.”

Postscript

Until recently Jeffrey Archer thought he was great chums with the Pearly King of Peckham, aka George Major. “As a Cockney myself, I’ve known him for over 20 years,” Archer says on his website. Then it all went downhill. “I went to a pub in Peckham yesterday called The World Turned Upside Down, for the launch of his autobiography, The Hidden Whistle and Flute. George kindly introduced me as the Mayor of London, and hoped that I’d be reelected.”

— Catherine Zeta-Jones tells the Press Association how she scares the kids at bedtime with her multiple personalities. “I was reading books to them, practising my Scottish accent and they were going, ‘Mama just speak the way you speak’, ‘Oh mama please speak properly’.” Yeah, mum. Back to that totally normal mid-Atlantic, Welsh-tinged drawl.

— “I love going shopping. I have a black belt in it. I’m not bragging, but I can do the supermarket in six minutes”, Russell Crowe tells the Newcastle Herald. Cue the call from Dale Winton.

— Humble pie from Rod Liddle, The Sunday Times columnist, in the letters page of The Spectator. “Sir,” he writes, “I deeply regret having written in a column a fortnight ago that Bea Campbell, one of the signatories to the letter endorsing Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London, was a ‘crop-headed, lesbian feminist member of the National Association of Irrationally Furious Women Against Everything, who works in Newcastle’. It is clear from Ms Campbell’s letter last week that an apology is in order: I of course accept that she does not work in Newcastle.”

Got a story to tell? people@thetimes.co.uk

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
• Brüno toned down for 15 rating