Gwyneth Paltrow is at her most magnificent on the cover of the celebrity bible Vanity Fair, blonde hair bouffant, staring defiantly into the camera, in a transparent lace top and short skirt showing off her gorgeous legs under the headline ‘Gwyneth’s World’.
And what a world it is – she’s a proper businesswoman worth $200 million, a happily married mother and, at 52, about to star in a sex-laden movie with Hollywood’s hottest actor Timothee Chalamet.
Her pose says it all – sublimely confident, as if issuing a challenge.
And there’s certainly one woman who might see it as a challenge – would-be businesswoman and Gwynnie’s Montecito neighbour Meghan Sussex, who has just launched her own new ventures including a podcast offering tips on how to succeed… in business.
Is the Goop magnate using the magazine interview to see off the interloper next door? One does not need to read long into the interview to find the barbs.
Asked about her neighbours, she says icily: ‘I don’t know Meghan and Harry, I’ve met Meghan, who seems really lovely, but I don’t know her at all.’ For which read Meghan is infra dig.
Gwynnie adds: ‘Maybe I’ll try to get through their security detail and bring them a pie,’ a clear jibe at the Sussexes’ overblown security operation.
Then a masterstroke of mischief as she says she hadn’t even seen the trailer of the universally derided With Love, Meghan Netflix series.
Gwyneth Paltrow said she’d love to give Harry and Meghan a homemade pie – adding, mischievously – provided she could get through their security detail
Some have billed the rivalry as Goop v Dupe. But Gwynnie is witheringly condescending, saying of Meghan’s ambitions: ‘Everyone deserves an attempt at everything they want to try.’
The final blow sees her in the kitchen wearing an apron emblazoned with ‘my father’s daughter’, a brand she set up in honour of her beloved dad after he died.
How can Meghan, who’s cut ties with her father, compete with that?
He’s the real thing!
Jason Isaacs starring in The White Lotus TV series
Jason Isaacs, stand-out star in The White Lotus TV series, is right to rebuke interviewers who asked if he wore a prosthetic penis in a scene where his dressing gown falls open. They wouldn’t ask an actress if her breasts were silicone!
For journalistic purposes only, I’ve now watched that scene on freeze-frame about 20 times and can assure you all it is the real thing.
Sickening that Stephen Lawrence’s murderer, David Norris, 48, jailed in 2013, is already being considered for parole. He says he is suffering from PTSD and that a public hearing would increase his emotional stress. Norris should be released only if he confesses everything, names Stephen’s other killers and is then sent out into his fellow murderers’ neighbourhoods. See how long he lasts then.
- Keir Starmer says the soaring cost of £65 billion sickness and disability benefits is ‘wreaking a terrible human cost’ – yes, on those who work. And stop saying it’s a ‘benefits trap’ when, for so many, not working is a conscious choice to sponge off the rest of us.
- Could Lady Starmer please have a quiet word with her husband about his too-tight white shirts? It is very difficult to take a jacketless PM seriously when we’re so distracted by his man boobs and nipples.
- Unwise of Kemi Badenoch to attack Nigel Farage for being a reality TV star given it invited the question which TV shows would want her. How about The Weakest Link?
Jagger’s girl faces up to reality
Georgia May Jagger and son Dean in new Zara Kids campaign
Adorable pictures of Mick Jagger’s model daughter Georgia May and his five-month-old grandson Dean in a new Zara campaign for kids clothes. Both joyful mum and baby are full-face to the camera, unlike so many celebs who conceal the identity of their offspring ‘for their privacy’ – as if anyone cared.
Good on former England manager Gareth Southgate for saying we must teach lads ‘the values that matter – courage, humility and integrity over selfishness, greed, arrogance’. It’s no small irony he made millions presiding over a bunch of selfish, greedy, arrogant footballers… who serve as role models to young men.
Nasa astronaut and Expedition 72 Commander Suni Williams
Many were shocked seeing pictures of astronaut Sunita Williams, 59, after being lost in space for nine months, her chestnut hair now grey and wild.
Sorry to break it to you, lads, but most middle-aged women who hadn’t had their colour and blowdrys done in 288 days would look pretty much the same.
I know I would.
Much excitement Chez Platell before the third series of Sky’s Gangs Of London. Yet it turned out to be so bloodthirsty it was almost impossible to watch.
It has a long way to go, though, to catch up to Game Of Thrones’ body count: 1,243 on-screen deaths in its first six seasons.
Be a man, don’t stay mum!
After humiliatingly telling him to shut up in public, Alec Balwin’s wife Hilaria has invented a new word: ‘manterrupting’.
No wonder Baldwin, now 66 and living with Hilaria and their seven kids, looks even more ancient than that other star with a brood of seven, 81-year-old Robert de Niro.
My moggie Ted welcomes calls for ‘cat cafes’ to be closed down. Ted says cats hate coffee, dislike being touched by strangers and if all these frothy café latte women want a supine companion in their lives they should get a dog – or a husband.
The pictures of Bruce Willis suffering with dementia surrounded by his family hugging him and laughing as they celebrate his 70th birthday strikes a chord with all of us who have travelled down that road. I have similar pictures of my family and Mum after Alzheimer’s hit her, even if by then she thought I was her sister, not her daughter. Memories to cherish.
We don’t dig snobs
Billionaire’s son Ben Goldsmith chides us amateur gardeners – along with pros like Alan Titchmarsh – saying a neat and tidy garden is a ‘rejection of nature’.
‘A delicate carpet of native wildflowers at the woodland edge is just not good enough,’ he says, and sneers that the need for neatness is turning the country into a ‘gaudy’ suburban roundabout.
Only one born into gazillions and who lives in a posh manor house surrounded by 260 Somerset acres could be such a repulsive snob.
