Is Paddick a candle in Elton’s wind?

Brian Paddick ran the London Marathon to raise money for the Elton John Aids Foundation. But has Sir Elton gone cold on his support for Paddick’s Lib Dem mayoral bid?

To much fanfare, the singer and his partner, David Furnish, hosted a fundraising dinner for the former copper in January. But since then?

Last month Paddick insisted that Furnish was “no idle bystander”. The Lib Dems say that he has been acting as a consultant on fundraising, but grow vague on details. Sir Elton, however, has been busy campaigning for Hillary Clinton, in a rather bigger political fight. The Libs Dems now admit that they are not expecting further support. Indeed, at a recent hustings, Paddick fretted that the pair could be registered in Windsor, so he might not even get their vote. We’ve checked. Happily he was wrong.

— Kate Hudson, star of a great many magazine covers and, we hear, a few films, is as weary of airbrushed celebrities as everybody else. “You need to let those things go,” she told us at the premiere of Fool’s Gold in Leicester Square, Central London. “I can’t tell you how many covers of magazines I’ve been on where my eyes are blue. I have green eyes.”

— Having avowed his republicanism that morning, Kevin Rudd’s chat with the Queen last week may have been awkward. Probably less so, though, than that of Gough Whitlam, his predecessor as Australian Prime Minister in the 1970s, who noticed a pungent smell, mid-audience. “Must be the corgis, Ma’am?” he said.

“Who else?” agreed the Queen.

— Gordon Brown has given a bottle of whisky to a 13-year-old. But calm down. The PM has donated the bottle, signed by his Cabinet, to Liam Fairhurst, a young cancer patient, to be auctioned at buyoncegivetwice.co.uk for the CLIC Sargent charity.

— Cate Blanchett has given birth to her third child with her husband, Andrew Upton. Ignatius Martin is a brother to Dashiell John and Roman Robert, all of whom may grow up to prefer their middle names

— Inaugurated yesterday as Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University, the Queen guitarist (Dr) Brian May hit out at government underfunding of science. “I think it is a big mistake and we are putting our future at risk,” he said, perhaps imagining a terrifying future where kids all want to be rock guitarists.

— Ofcom says that the Christmas special of The Catherine Tate Show was not offensive, despite having garnered more than a hundred complaints for repeated use of the F-word. “The BBC said that it does not regard any word as being more obscene on one day than on another,” reported the regulator.

— Cheer up, Gordon. Carla Bruni will soon be back. Maybe you can invite her round for tea and lunge at her cheek again.

Speaking to the British Airways High Life magazine, the French First Lady declares that she is keen to visit the birthplace of a British national treasure. Fife? Ah no. Stratford.

“I have a love of Shakespeare,” she explains. “My friend Marianne Faithfull, or ‘my dear professor’ as I like to call her, insists that I read a couple of his sonnets every day.”

Postscript

“You are meeting the character when he was on the downslide,” explains Daniel Craig of his role in the new film, Flashbacks of a Fool. “He is at a stage when he could have had everything in his life but he has thrown it all away.” Does Craig fear a similar future for himself? “It’s part of the profession,” he told reporters, breezily, at the premiere in Leicester Square on Sunday. “It could turn on a sixpence.” Unlikely though, really.

— A surprising conspiracy theorist in the serene-looking singer Alicia Keys. “Gangsta rap”, she tells Blender magazine, “was a [government] ploy to convince black people to kill each other. Gangsta rap didn’t exist.” Before it was invented, no.

— Hip-hop at Glastonbury? “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” snarls Noel Gallagher of the rapper Jay-Z’s high-profile gig scheduled for this year’s festival. “If you start to break it then people aren’t going to go,” he told BBC Online. “I’m sorry, but Jay-Z? No chance.” That’s the spirit.

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