Cleese boards Obama-wagon

John Cleese wants to write speeches for Barack Obama.

“I am due to come to Europe in November,” he says from Los Angeles, “but I may be tied up until then because if Barack Obama gets the nomination I’m going to offer my services to him as a speech writer. I think he’s a brilliant man.” We now live in hope that the 2009 inaugural address will be like that speech at the end of Clockwise. Or failing that, Obama will pledge to “welease Woddewick”.

Cleese made the comments to the Western Daily Press during an interview about Bristol City Football Club. That should do it.

Gordon Brown may be drowning amid a sea of public opprobrium in this island, but in the Stars and Stripes land of celebrity he is fêted. In an edition of the American Pop Idol talent show to be shown tonight, the Prime Minister is cheered to the rafters when he promises in a recorded interview that he will buy 20 million mosquito nets for Africa at £5 each.

What next, one wonders, from the dour man of the Presybterian manse to distract from domestic woes? Will he scale Sydney Opera House shouting: “I will give the Aborigines their land back”?

Or perhaps he will pop up in Tibet alongside the Dalai Lama promising an end to tyrannical rule.

Not content with prominent roles in the world of football, the world of oil and the world of being incredibly rich, is Roman Abramovich planning a foray into the arts? The Russian arts blog izo.com spreads rumours that he is planning to sponsor a gallery of modern art in Moscow, perhaps to be run by his girlfriend, Darya Zhukova, and probably to be housed in a Konstantin Melnikov bus garage.

As a result of her latest tantrum, Naomi Campbell has been banned from British Airways flights. Now a quick-thinking bod from Ocean Sky Aviation e-mails to suggest that, next time, she hires her own plane, at “£140,00 return” to Los Angeles. Pretty cheap, we tell the PR. Missing zero, he replies. Damn.

Moby, bald, odd and 42, tells The Advocate that he has fallen in love with Britney Spears. “She’s like this Tennessee Williams tragic figure,” he says. “The fatter she gets, the weirder she gets, the more I love her. I found her moderately appealing in the late ’90s, but now I would marry her in a heartbeat.” She’s done worse.

It is only Day 2, but we are already pushed for space in our new regular slot entitled: Things We Can’t Believe We Didn’t Know About Charlton Heston . So, a short one. Industry sources insist the great man wore a wig. Moreover, according to slightly less credible sources, he was so sensitive about this wig that, in one 1970s historical film, his costume-period wig had to be fitted over the top.

Guests who attended a memorial service at Southwark Cathedral last week get in touch to report that cathedral authorities took the curious step of banning the singing of the hymn Jerusalem. A diocesan spokesman says: “The Dean of Southwark does not believe that it is to the glory of God and it is not therefore used in private memorial services.” Discuss.

Writing in the Daily Mail, Lord Tebbit remembers Spitting Image, which cast him as a stomping leather-clad bovver boy. “I believe only two politicians really liked their puppets,” he writes. “Michael Heseltine, who was cast as a wild-haired Tarzan, and myself.”

So gracious! And yet, the journalist Rob McGibbon recalls Jeffrey Archer telling him that Tebbit loathed his puppet. Whom to believe?

Who should play Des Browne in a film? Speaking at the launch of Forgotten Soldiers: The Irishmen Shot at Dawn , by Stephen Walker, Browne said that, in any film of the story (which concerns his pardon of Irishmen shot in the Great War) he should be played by Kevin Spacey. That might work. But only if they can’t get Tom Conti. Or maybe Joe Pesci.

Postscript

Why has George Clooney ended up with eight godchildren? “Because I have cash,” he tells Hello. “It just dawned on me. For a while there, I was thinking, ‘God, these friends really like me. They think I’m responsible.’ But no. I got the cash and if the parents die in a plane crash, they can give the kids to the rich guy.”

“I love clothes,” Vanessa Redgrave tells Vogue. “But I don't bother about them. I don't enjoy shopping for clothes – unless they're for someone else. The kind of shops I like are hardware stores, secondhand bookshops and fishing tackle stores.” Your typical 71-year-old woman, then.

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