A LIFETIME OF AGONISING IN INSECURITY
Opposing Putin
Alexei Navalny has had to abandon his plan to run against President Putin in next month’s elections, says Tom Parfitt in The Times. Owing to his conviction on what he insists were trumped-up fraud charges in 2013, he has been deemed ineligible. But he’s still campaigning, not for votes, but for the opposite: a boycott. At the same time, he is carrying on with his efforts to expose the corruption of the Russian elite. Billions in ill-gotten gains are being funnelled into cities like London, he says, but he can’t persuade governments in the West to crack down on it. As for the esteem in which Putin is held by some Western politicians, this baffles him. “[It] is an absolutely incredible mystery,” he says, laughing. “Why does Le Pen love him, why does UKIP love him? Everything he does should be abhorrent to them. Putin is against any limits on immigration. Putin created in Chechnya a sharia-supporting, Islamist terrorist state. So when I look at right-wing Europeans who love Putin, the only conclusion is that they receive money from him – or they are insane.”
Stansfield on Blair
Lisa Stansfield has mixed feelings about the Labour Party, says Kate Mossman in the New Statesman. The Manchester-born singer – Britain’s biggest solo female pop star in the 1990s – helped fund Tony Blair’s 1997 election campaign and met him at the party HQ. “He’s like you would imagine him to be,” she says, spreading her legs wide open to indicate his demeanour. “That good, he’d eat himself. He asked me, ‘How’s it going?’ I said, ‘The tour’s going really well thanks.’ He said, ‘I’m talking about me!’ I gave him a lot of money, but I’m not going to f***ing do it again! Mind you...” She reconsiders. “Looking back, I would love Blair to take on the mantle again. I’ve lost hope with politics. I do hope Labour get in, but I see Jeremy Corbyn as someone who plays guitar in a church and is down with the kids. One of those people who’s always talking to young people because he’s afraid if he talked to a peer he might, you know, get it a bit wrong...”
Liam Gallagher’s aroma
Liam Gallagher is not a shrinking violet now – and he never has been. “I dunno where it comes from,” he shrugs, “but I’ve always been a bit of an arrogant c***, even when I was digging holes for a living in Manchester, sitting there going, ‘What the f*** am I doing here?’” It’s probably why he was never rattled by Oasis’s meteoric rise. “I was comfortable walking straight into that suit,” he told Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. “It didn’t freak me out at all. I always thought I was important from day dot. Success and that, all that stuff, fitted my f***ing aroma.” He frowns. “That’s not the word, is it?” Persona? “Persona, that’s it.” He nods. “But it fitted my aroma too.” Helen Mirren has a reputation for being fearless – but she isn’t. On the contrary, she has always been chronically insecure. She began having panic attacks in her teens, and she has suffered from acute self-doubt ever since. “Actually, let’s say experienced rather than suffered,” she says, narrowing her eyes. “I’m beginning to get a bit fed up of all this ‘suffering’. But yes, I have experienced insecurity all my life, and I still do on a daily basis.” As a young woman, she had the usual worries about her appearance, she told Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph – but actresses learn to be pragmatic about their looks. “You don’t get cast for things and then you see someone who does, and she is much prettier but often not such a good actress, and you think: ‘Ah, OK, I get the picture.’ No: for me, still now, it’s to do with wit and intelligence… I don’t feel clever or funny enough.” All this is one of the reasons that Mirren has agreed to front a new L’oréal Paris/prince’s Trust initiative to help young people develop a sense of self-worth. The other is the memory of a particular school friend. “David was so kind, so smart and so funny. He would have been an incredible adult out there in the world, but back then he had a drunken father and terrible acne, and he just couldn’t see a way out. So he killed himself.” She pauses. “It impacted me so profoundly at the time, because instinctively I understood why he had done it.”