Pick of the week’s Gossip

Last year, Robbie Williams revealed that he had taken to reading comments about himself on Mail Online.

“It was hellish,” he recalled. “The person (me) that they were describing was the most horrendous person that ever walked the planet.” To cheer himself up, he decided to read the comments under articles about “good salt-of-the-earth folk”, so looked for one about Ant and Dec. “The second comment said: ‘I hate these two almost as much as I hate that fat c**t Robbie Williams.’”

Rumours that Harold Wilson (pictured) had an affair with Marcia Williams, his powerful private secretary, have circulated for decades. Now, two of the former Labour PM’s aides have claimed that Wilson had a second affair that he kept totally secret. According to Joe Haines, 96, Wilson had a short relationship with his deputy press secretary, Janet Hewlett-Davies, in the early 1970s, when he was in his 50s and she was in her 30s (and both were married). Confirming the story, Bernard Donoughue, 89, described it as a “little sunshine at sunset”. Haines claims that at Chequers, he once swapped rooms with Hewlett-Davies to make it easier for Wilson to sneak in. “And what did he do? He left his slippers under her bed.”

As editor of the Mirror, Piers Morgan vowed to dig up dirt on Ian Hislop, after the Private Eye editor was rude about him on Have I Got News forYou. Coming up with nothing, he sent a photographer to wait outside Hislop’s house. When Hislop asked what he was up to, the man explained: “I want a picture of you looking happy so we can put it in the paper after some disaster, so it looks like you’re callous.”