Pick of the week’s Gossip

Madonna has confessed that being a soccer mom is more demanding than being a pop star. “You have no life in a way, because games change from weekend to weekend: sometimes they’re in the city, sometimes they’re not, and we never know until Thursday night whether they’re on Saturday or Sunday, at 12pm or later. It’s impossible to make plans.” As well as ferrying her 12-year-old son David to and from games, the singer has even moved home so that he can attend one of the world’s best football academies. “It was between Turin, Barcelona and Lisbon. I went to all those places and tried to imagine myself living there.” She liked Turin (“a city for intellectuals”) and Barcelona (“super fun”) but settled on Lisbon. “I always say the three Fs rule in Portugal: fado, football and Fátima. It’s also a very Catholic country, which suits me fine.” Jeremy Hunt reduced Chinese officials to fits of laughter by giving his wife Lucia Guo – who comes from Xian – the wrong nationality. “My wife is Japanese… my wife is Chinese. Sorry!” the new Foreign Secretary declared on a visit to Beijing. His mistake, he later explained, arose from the fact that he and his Chinese counterpart had been talking in Japanese, which they both speak fluently. Asked whether Hunt’s apparent inability to tell one country from another was a cause for concern, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said that Hunt (pictured above with Guo) was “very clear” on the difference between the two.