Pick of the week’s Gossip

Theresa May’s decision to wear £995 leather trousers for a photo shoot last year caused a major row in the Tory party. Nicky Morgan publicly criticised her extravagance, and wondered how it would play in “Loughborough market”: in retaliation, May’s former aide, Fiona Hill, banished her from No. 10. But it now transpires that the trousers weren’t the PM’S, and that wearing the outfit hadn’t been her idea. According to her former communications director, Katie Perrior, May had wanted to wear her own clothes. It was Hill who insisted she couldn’t – and who begged the designer Amanda Wakeley to send over some alternatives. “All went well until later,” said Perrior, “when one of my colleagues popped into my office to tell me that we may have a problem: did I know the outfit the PM finally chose cost two grand?” The British photographer David Slater was delighted when, on a trip to Indonesia in 2011, he persuaded a rare crested black macaque to take a selfie. The photo became famous, and earned him a few thousand pounds – but more recently, it has embroiled him in a legal battle that is ruining his life. The animal rights group Peta has gone to court in the US, arguing that as the monkey took the photo, it owns the copyright. Not only that, Peta is threatening to sue Slater, on the monkey’s behalf, for copyright infringement, for using the photo in a book. Slater – who insists that the claimant, Naruto, isn’t even the right macaque – says the case has left him so broke, “I’m even thinking about doing dog walking”.