Without a paddle
Courts: It was a week in which Anne Darwin must have wished she could
set out to sea in a canoe and never come back. She stood in the dock at
Teeside crown court as the jury heard how she had told a catalogue of lies
while apparently helping her husband John to fake his own death. Darwin, 56,
pictured above, not only convinced the police, insurance companies and a
coroner that her husband died at sea in March 2002, but also duped her sons,
Mark and Anthony. The boys were flabbergasted, the court heard, when, five
years later, a photo emerged of their parents visiting an estate agent in
Panama, where they planned to start a new life together.
Darwin, sobbing, claimed she was coerced into the £250,000 life insurance
fraud by her husband and had pleaded with him to drop the plan. But Andrew
Robertson, for the prosecution, insisted she played her role “with aplomb”.
She denies 15 counts of deception and money laundering. John Darwin has
admitted deception. The trial continues.
Drawing a veil
Art: Banksy – artist, vandal, or a posh ex-public school boy called
Robin Gunningham? The man whose work now sells for six figures but who
started out as a graffiti artist, was apparently unmasked last week as a
former pupil from the £9,420-a-year Bristol cathedral school. As a teenager
Banksy hid from police after painting “Late Again” in silver bubble letters
on the side of a Bristol train; later stunts included leaving a depiction of
a Guantanamo Bay detainee at Disneyland and stencilling “We’re bored of
fish” in London Zoo’s penguin enclosure.
His efforts to keep his identity secret have given him an almost mythical
status; but after a Bristol resident identified a rare photograph of Banksy
as a likeness of Gunningham, investigators found similarities between what
is known of the artist’s life and the background of the middle-class boy who
left school at 16. Banksy’s agent has refused to say whether the reports are
correct. Interestingly, in a phone interview with the pop culture magazine
Swindle a few years ago, Banksy said: “The reality of me would be a crushing
disappointment to 15-year-old kids out there.”
Lembit split
Celebrity: They dubbed it a marriage made in Hello . . . Finally, it
seems as though the curtain is coming down on the engagement of one of our
oddest celebrity couples. On Monday the 18-month relationship between
43-year-old Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik and Cheeky Girl pop star
Gabriela Irimia, 25, pictured right, was reported to have hit the buffers.
Irimia – who is thought to be embarrassed by Opik’s Vauxhall Cavalier and
irritated by his parliamentary workload – has reportedly not spoken to her
fiancé for two weeks. The Lib Dem housing spokesman proposed to Irimia by
Rome’s Trevi fountain in April.
Excess stress
Politics: MPs may be under fire over snaffling goodies from John Lewis,
but they attracted some sympathy as well last week. One in five MPs has
suffered from mental health problems, a study found on Wednesday – but
refuse to talk about them publicly for fear of damaging their careers. The
all-party parliamentary group on mental health said that politicians keep
even extreme cases of stress quiet because the law forces them to stand down
if they are ever sectioned. Lynne Jones MP, who co-chairs the group, called
the survey a “damning indictment of society’s attitude to mental health”.
The MPs’ plight drew sympathy from the leaders of mental health charities, who
pointed admiringly to the example of Kjell Magne Bondevik, a former
Norwegian prime minister, who publicly disclosed his experience of
depression and went on to be reelected.
The last laugh
Cinema: Stars were falling over each other last week to praise the late
Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in the new Batman film – and to tip
him for a posthumous Oscar. “The best performance of a villain I have seen,”
was the assessment of Sir Michael Caine after the world premiere of The Dark
Knight in New York, where theactors were snapped swaying down a black
carpetrather than the traditional crimson one. Caine predicted that Ledger,
pictured above, would receive at least an Academy Award nomination for his
role as the grotesque villain. Ledger, who was found dead of a prescription
drugs overdose at his Manhattan apartment in January, “out-scares Hannibal
Lecter”, according to Gary Oldman, who plays Lieutenant Jim Gordon in the
film.
The praise was not quite universal, however. Terry Gilliam, the former Monty
Python star, dismissed calls for a campaign to award Ledger an Oscar as a
stunt by Warner Bros, the studio. “They’ll do anything to publicise their
film,” he said. The London premiere is tomorrow.
All adds up
Internet: Fed up with malicious “tittle-tattle” about his divorce,
multi-millionaire Gary Dean took the unusual step of posting the details of
his wife’s £3.7m settlement on the internet. The advertising executive, 47,
set up deandivorce.com to silence critics who, he claimed, had branded him a
“greedy, tight, ruthless bastard” after he left his wife of 20 years and
their four children.
In addition to the cash lump sum, the website claims that Helen Dean, 47, is
to keep all her jewellery, two luxury cars and her “cherished” number
plates. She will also receive £15,000 per child per annum, on top of private
school fees. Although the couple met when Dean earned only around £700 a
week, his later success meant they could afford a £2m home near Preston and
two or three foreign holidays a year. Helen Dean has declined to comment.
Nuclear growth
Science: Eight new nuclear power stations must be built across England
to cut Britain’s dependence on oil, Gordon Brown said on Monday. Britain’s
10 existing nuclear power stations currently provide about 20% of the
country’s power, but by 2023 all but one will have been shut down.
The location of the new power stations will be confirmed in 2010. Most are
expected to be built on or near existing sites – such as Hinkley in
Somerset, Sizewell in Suffolk or Dungeness in Kent – but some people will be
faced with a nuclear plant in their backyard for the first time.
Sats mess
Education: When does a literate, imaginative piece of writing get a
lower mark than one riddled with spelling mistakes, shoddy punctuation and
poor grammar? When it’s submitted as part of this year’s national tests
taken by 11 to 14-year-olds. As the Sats exam fiasco was exposed last week,
Janis Burdin, head of a Lancashire primary school, published two of her
pupils’ English writing scripts in support of her demand that papers be
remarked. A child who wrote “If he wasent doing enthing els heel help his
uncle Herry” got one mark more than one who wrote “Quickly, it became
apparent that Pip was a fantastic rider: a complete natural.”
On Wednesday, Labour MP Barry Sheerman claimed that teenagers were marking
Sats tests. “It’s a total muck-up,” he said. The disclosure is another blow
for Educational Testing Service, the American firm that holds a £165m
five-year government contract to grade Sats papers.
Court date
Scandal: The heir to the £5.4 billion Tetra Pak packaging empire and
his wife were charged with possessing crack cocaine and heroin last Monday.
Eva Rausing, 44, was arrested in April after small amounts of the class A
drugs were allegedly found in her handbag at the US embassy in London. She
was also charged with possession of a class C drug.
According to reports, drugs were later found during a search of the Rausings’
£10m Chelsea townhouse, which led to the arrest of 45-year-old Hans Kristian
Rausing, Britain’s seventh richest man. The couple are due to appear at City
of Westminster magistrates’ court on July 29.
Don’t txtndrv
Law: Dnt driv whlst txtin or u cud go 2 prisn. That’s the warning
from judges in England, who are proposing jail sentences of up to seven
years for drivers who crash and kill someone while texting or talking on
mobile phones. The tougher penalties were announced on Tuesday by the
Sentencing Guidelines Council, chaired by the lord chief justice. They come
into effect on August 4.
Motorists in the most serious cases could face a maximum of 14 years in
prison. The new measures follow years of complaints by bereaved families and
road safety campaigners about lenient punishments for negligent drivers. A
Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “Ensuring drivers who cause death on our
roads through bad driving are suitably punished is essential.”
The writing SATs have been very harshly marked this year. The examiner did not know what a 'just level 4' child's writing looked like. They were put into the middle of the lower band rather than being given the mark in the middle of the next band up despite achieving it. They got L3 instead of L4.
Gilli-Marie, Nottingham, UK