HICKEY

RESPONDING to yesterday’s political news, Left-wing actor Robert Lindsay, 69, bitterly announces: “Congratulations to the Labour defectors, you’ve just handed the next general election to the worst government in our history.”

Lindsay, pictured, appears to be channelling his old sitcom alter-ego, Marxist revolutionary and Tooting Popular Front member and “urban guerrilla” Wolfie Smith.

SEVENTIES heartthrob David Essex, 71, has to endure an ominous reminder whenever performing in Stoke-on-Trent.

“If I’m playing Stoke, I stay at the same hotel and the bloke there always says, ‘This is the hotel [fellow singer and actor] Adam Faith died in’,” he reveals, jokily adding: “I say, ‘Oh, that’s very nice!’”

Asked on Radio 2 whether his hosts put him in the room once occupied by Faith (he died following a heart attack aged 62 in 2003), Essex insists: “Yes, they do!”

AS HICKEY recently reported, John Cleese has taken to publicly championing an Australian racehorse called Manuel, in honour of the character played by late Fawlty Towers co-star Andrew Sachs.

Details now emerge of the story apparently behind the comic’s association. The horse’s owner, Australian car dealer Gary Lechte, is a longtime fan of the show, and previously decided to buy 79-year-old Cleese’s Bentley after learning it was for sale. The one proviso was that he had lunch with the famously grumpy performer.

Wary of “clingy fans” The Australian newspaper claims Cleese bizarrely turned up “with his head in bandages… a fake injury designed to give him a good excuse to cut the lunch short.”

Thankfully the two men instead became “firm friends”.