Monday
So much bad news around these days, but at the beginning of this week, like a shaft of pure sunlight, we heard of a nonagenarian finding love and marrying his sweetheart in a small ceremony attended only by his closest business associates and, judging by reports, none of his children.
Rupert Murdoch, the tycoon who keeps giving, delivers yet another Hallmark moment with his fifth marriage, this time to Elena Zhukova, a woman widely characterised in the press as a “67-year-old retired molecular biologist”, although the more pertinent biographical detail, to my mind, is that she used to be married to an oil billionaire and was once Roman Abramovich’s mother-in-law. (Zhukova’s daughter, Dasha, very much entering the family business, was formerly married to the Russian oligarch.)
As ever when discussing the Dirty Digger’s private life, the main question is: why? Why does he marry these women? The narrative put about by those who know and have worked with the man is that Murdoch, who divorced Jerry Hall in 2022 and for a lively fortnight last year was engaged to Ann Lesley Smith, is an “incurable romantic”. I have heard these very words from the mouth of a different billionaire, who, in keeping with the fellow feeling people tend to have towards other members of their class, was adamant that Murdoch is just a soppy old thing.
Tuesday
The rumble in the jungle, the thrilla in Manila, the … leaders’ debate in Salford, featuring two men who have made the surprising decision to pursue careers that require them to appear frequently on television. It was hard, in the debate’s opening moments, to choose who had the more awkward style: Sunak, an odd combo of obsequious head boy and pleading class punch bag, or Starmer, giving off so much adenoidal Dad’s Army energy that all he lacked was a hand-knitted scarf. Ruddy hooligans!
The quote of the evening was undoubtedly Sunak’s, badgered out of him when Starmer mocked his assertion that NHS waiting lists are coming down. What, asked Starmer, does “coming down” mean when waiting lists are at 7.5m? “They’re coming down from where they were when they were higher,” said Sunak, before repeating Starmer’s phrase “smash the gangs”, a reminder that, no matter the argument, you can never repeat what the other person just said and hope to retain your dignity.
Wednesday
A choice paragraph in a recent Grazia interview with Victoria Beckham disclosed that her 12-year-old daughter, Harper, whipped up a PowerPoint presentation to lobby her parents to a) let her get her hair permed and b) drop netball because it threatened her nails.
What David and Victoria’s ruling on the netball request might’ve been remains undisclosed, but it was, according to the article, a hard no on the question of the perm. This leads one to wonder more generally about what may or may not be permitted as the daughter of Posh Spice. This is a woman who, after all, hasn’t knowingly eaten butter for 25 years, suggesting a fraught relationship with joy also present in her inability to let her kid choose a bad haircut. Although, by the sounds of it, Harper is more than capable of standing up for herself and, via presentation software, prosecuting a more sensible agenda.
Thursday
What tanking American media brands need right now is the deployment of a lot of white guys from Britain. News from the Washington Post this week that the editor, Sally Buzbee, is out and a contingent of British men are coming in, was met on social media with a collective eye-roll, mostly from British women in leadership positions. There are, I’m sure, lots of perfectly adequate white men running things in Britain but, taken as a group, it is safe to say British women are less seduced by their curb appeal than Jeff Bezos appears to be.
Will Lewis, the chief executive of the Post, who is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and a British white guy, appointed Robert Winnett, who is his protege, a deputy editor of the Telegraph and a British white guy, to take over as editor of the Post shortly after the US presidential election this November, a bold choice given Winnett’s lack of experience in the US market.
He will, I’m sure, be fantastic – he is, after all, a white guy from Britain – and pursue with some vigour the story covered by Buzbee that may have hastened her departure from the company. That is: Prince Harry’s phone-hacking case, in which the latest executive to be accused of engaging in a plan to conceal evidence is one Will Lewis. He denies the allegations. American hacks, meanwhile, look on in horror. As NPR claimed this week: “Lewis has engaged in intense efforts to head off coverage about him in ways that many US journalists would consider deeply inappropriate.” Oo-er!
Friday
A friend who lives downtown texts me after catching sight of more saviours: “There are clean-cut young white guys shovelling mulch in Tompkins Square Park, wearing T-shirts that say MORGAN STANLEY VOLUNTEERS,” she writes. How thrilling. I need to know how one gets in touch with these people, what other services they offer, whether they can come round and clean my flat, and where I can get one of those T-shirts.
