IT’S OFFICIAL. Rebekah Wade, the fiesty, red-haired queen of the red tops, former Editor of the News of the World and at the helm of The Sun for the last two years, is really an empathetic and intellectual romantic. And she has a forgiving heart.

All has been revealed in the choice of her favourite poem for Magma, the award-winning poetry magazine which asks public figures to name the poem dearest to them. La Wade chose the enigmatic Counting the Beats, by Robert Graves, poet, bohemian and writer of the celebrated I Claudius novels.

Wade took the poet’s collected works to Majorca — Graves lived in Deia in the northern hills — last year with her husband Ross Kemp. They read the poem to each other. “We love it and it had a special poignancy for us as Graves wrote it for his wife Beryl shortly before he died on the island,” she said.

And the forgiving? Wade and Marjorie Wallace, head of the mental health charity SANE, had a bad falling out in February after The Sun ran a “Bonkers Bruno” headline following the boxer’s admission to a psychiatric hospital. But they have kissed and made up and are both featured on the cover of Magma, which is available in bookshops this week.

Counting the Beats

You, love, and I,
(He whispers) you and I,
And if no more than only you and I
What care you or I?
Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.
Cloudless day,
Night, and a cloudless day,
Yet the huge storm will burst upon their heads one day
From a bitter sky.

The secret’s out of the red boxes

SO WHOSE ministerial red boxes were Gordon Brown and the former Chancellors Lord Lamont of Lerwick and Ken Clarke brandishing in Downing Street to promote the Under the Stars gala in Whitehall tonight for the late Cardinal Hume’s charity, The Passage? Step forward Ann Widdecombe, who is on the board of the charity for the homeless. The boxes were locked, prompting Brown to ask: “Where did Miss Widdecombe get them from and what’s inside?” No, the Tory former minister did not help herself. “I paid for them when we left office,” she said, without revealing the contents.

Jungle drums

Comedian Vic Reeves, lowered into the I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! camp in a basket of leaves as the surprise eleventh contestant, was greeted with a kiss by wife Nancy Sorrell, who had kept his appearance a secret. As the couple headed to bed, Janet Street Porter moaned: “I’m not going to sleep in my bed if they are going to make noises all night. I’m not happy about being near to sex bombs.”

Falling about

RADICALISM is alive and well at Corpus Christi, Oxford, where students sent a get well card to Fidel Castro, who is recovering from a broken knee and arm. The Communist icon, 78, fell while making a university graduation speech last month. The college JCR has also written to the Director of the CIA wishing him “better luck next time” — a reference to theories that Castro did not fall but was tripped in another bungled assassination attempt.

• “Shhhh” used to be the loudest noise one expected to hear in the best libraries. But with the advent of modern technology, complaints are mounting about incessant laptop jingles and mobile phone chatter. Now the British Library is conducting a survey on the use of mobile phones with a view to banning them. The rules that they must be silent, with no calls made or received, are broken daily. “Since this is such an emotive subject, we expect the response rate to be very high,” my bookworm said.

  Gherkin repeat

  LORD FOSTER of Thames Bank’s award-winning Gherkin office block in the City may be finding it hard to attract tenants, but it is to be replicated. Foster, new Labour’s favourite architect, has been given a new commission. “It is a prototype for a desk lamp,” the architect said at a party at his London studio. “An Italian company has approached me with a view to doing a set of limited edition Gherkin-shaped lamps.”

  PS

• The Grammy award-winning musician Tom Waits made a rare public performance to a sell-out crowd that included Johnny Depp and the film director Tim Burton at the Hammersmith Apollo, in London. Tickets for Waits’s first UK concert for 17 years sold out in 20 minutes.

  E-mail: people@thetimes.co.uk

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