Pick of the week’s Gossip

Daniel Craig has revealed that he started going to gay bars years ago, because he got so “sick” of getting into punchups in straight ones. But the actor admitted that initially, the more relaxed vibe wasn’t his only motive. “Everybody was chill. You didn’t really have to sort of state your sexuality... And I could meet girls there, ‘cause there are a lot of girls there for exactly the same reason I was.”

One of David Amess’s best anecdotes concerned the origins of what he called the

“holy sweet”, recalled the MP James Duddridge this week. A devout Catholic, Amess often visited the Vatican, and once joined a receiving line as the Pope was dispensing blessings. Amess had a sore throat that day, and reached into his pocket for a boiled sweet – just as he got to the front of the queue. Assuming it was his revered object, the Pope took the sweet out of his hand, and blessed it. “When David would tell the anecdote, he’d reach into his pocket and say, ‘And this is the sweet!’. I suspect there have been many sweets passed off as the holy sweet,” Duddridge added.

The rivalry between the Rolling Stones and The Beatles goes back decades, and last week Paul McCartney did his best to keep the fight alive, by claiming that the Stones were really just a “blues cover band”. The Fab Four, he said, cast their musical net “a bit wider”. It follows on from an interview last year, in which he said The Beatles were definitely the better band. “That’s so funny,” said Mick Jagger at the time. “He’s a sweetheart. There’s obviously no competition. One band is unbelievably luckily still playing in stadiums, and then the other band doesn’t exist.”