Pick of the week’s Gossip

Concern is growing that Matt Hancock may be conducting Zoom TV interviews from his downstairs lavatory. The Health Secretary was interviewed about the state of the vaccination roll-out for the BBC and Sky last weekend, from a small room with red walls adorned with frames and bookcases. “Is Matt Hancock doing interviews from his toilet,” asked one Twitter user. “It looks like he’s trapped in the most middle-class toilet ever,” said another. Still another suggested that “he must have a laptop on the cistern and be sitting backwards on the bog”.

He’s best known for shaking his maracas in a drug haze as the Happy Mondays’ dancer – but “Madchester” icon Bez has now launched his own lockdown exercise classes. In a new YouTube series, Get Buzzin’ With Bez, the 56-yearold is seen working out with a personal trainer, visiting a psychologist and trying hypnotherapy. The last lockdown, he says, left him “seriously unfit, with a fat belly and creaky hips”. So where does Bez see himself in the crowded field of online fitness classes? “I’d like to think I’m somewhere between Joe Wicks and Mr Motivator.”

A reader of the Popbitch newsletter recalls escorting Nicholas Parsons to an event for a local newspaper. The late broadcaster “was as charming and urbane as you’d expect all the way through Croydon’s Whitgift Shopping Centre”, said the reader – but in the lift going up to the function, he launched into an expletive-filled rant about “how godawful Croydon and its inhabitants were. The doors opened onto the room as the C-word was being deployed, but Nicholas just looked back at me and said: ‘And that is why I never use the word,’ and pressed forward to press the flesh.”