VANISHED STAR DUFFY’S NEW MESSAGE OF HOPE
The Welsh singer has delighted fans with her clip
DUFFY has surfaced online for the first time in three years with a positive message for loyal fans. The Grammy winner, 39, posted a short video for her 176,000 Instagram followers.
The Welsh star, who broke out in 2008 with smash hit Mercy, vanished from the music scene in 2011 before revealing nine years later she had retired after being kidnapped and raped.
Her comeback clip features an abstract animation and a voiceover excerpt from self-help book The Strength In Our Scars by Bianca Sparacino.
The voice reads: ‘You’re going to realise it one day that happiness was never about your job or your degree or being in a relationship [or] following in the footsteps of all of those who came before you. It was always about embracing the person you
INSTAGRAM were becoming… learning to live with yourself. Your happiness was never in the hands of others. It was always about you.’
Duffy wrote: ‘A little something to motivate the heart. Hope you are all doing well. Lots of love, Duffy.’ Fans were overjoyed to hear from the triple Brit winner, whose debut album Rockferry sold more than 2million copies in the UK.
User Sio said: ‘We love you and hope and wish you are happy, fulfilled and where your heart wants you to be.’ Welsh fan Danielle commented: ‘So much love from Wales. We are all behind you Duffy.’ Duffy wrote in a 2020 blog post that she had been abducted from her home and held hostage in a foreign country, where she was drugged and raped repeatedly. She said she never went to police as she didn’t feel safe, and it took an extremely long time to ‘reclaim the shattered pieces of me’.
■ PADDY McGuinness and Chris Harris are back behind the wheel for a BBC series, Chris & Paddy: Roadtrip. Unlike their old show Top Gear there are ‘no stunts, no car reviews’ as an insider told The Sun: ‘They will travel across Europe, using various modes of transport, visiting people to find the secrets to wellness and happiness.’
■ The government has heavily criticised members of the House of Lords for delaying the passage of their controversial Rwanda Deportation Bill.
But as the famous proverb says ‘People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones!’
The primary role of the House of Lords is to act as a revising chamber for legislation being proposed by House of Commons MPs. They are a bulwark against a possible lack of legality, accountability or transparency of legislation being proposed.
In the case of the Rwanda Deportation Bill, the Lords have said, for example, that they would be unhappy about unaccompanied child asylum seekers being deported, or asylum seekers from Afghanistan (who had worked with British troops as translators) being deported with no right of appeal.
Surely any MP with a conscience would agree that those kinds of proposals being made by the Lords, were fair and that they made common sense?
But no, the British government simply wants to force through its Rwanda legislation, with scant regard to its legality, morality or its huge cost to the British taxpayer!
What’s even worse is the fact that the British government know full well that if and when the Labour party assume power in a few months’ time, that the Rwanda policy will not just be dead in the water – it will have sunk to the bottom of the English Channel.
Alan Jensen, West Hampstead
■ What is the point of the Lords? They should be abolished. They are mostly a bunch of old farts who don’t do anything worthwhile for the country and get hundreds of pounds a day, tax-free, for doing naff all.
James Bradshaw, London
■ If Jacky from London (MetroTalk, Mon) is unsure who to vote at the next election, there are a few options. She either votes for a fringe party (including Liberal Democrats) who are single-issue parties – e.g. immigration, climate, crime, local issues – or she votes for one of the two main parties, i.e. Labour or Conservative.
The only alternative to the Tories is Labour. Remember the origins of Labour were helping the less well-off, with the NHS and welfare system, not the selfish greed of the Tories who have only looked after the rich.
Martin Hughes, Via Email
■ Rishi Sunak suggests that inflation is under control – but it isn’t as far as the BoE is concerned. Instead of reducing rates by 0.25 per cent last week, they held for what most think will be for another two, maybe three months. They were too slow to start raising rates – making matters worse – and now it looks like they’re going to be too slow to reduce rates. Between the government and the Bank, it doesn’t look like a team to ensure our much-needed growth.
Unfortunately for us, the players on the sidelines waiting to take over look even more incompetent – can we please have a credible 3rd alternative. Proportional representation is long overdue.
Jim, London
■ Jacky quite correctly challenges Rishi Sunak’s statement that while inflation has dropped to 3.4 per cent ‘we have turned the corner’ on the economy and we will notice our finances improving (MetroTalk. Mon). She says she ‘no longer believes anything the current government has to
say’ and millions of people in the UK will agree with her.
Rent and mortgage costs remain too high and food prices in the supermarkets are frequently going up, not coming down. Energy costs remain high and are unaffordable for many people! Food banks report that more and more people are using them. More than 4million children are reported to be living in poverty, homelessness and rough sleeping are on the increase and the Resolution Foundation has now said that housing in the UK is amongst the worst of any advanced economy in the world.
Mr Sunak is gaslighting the British public when he says that we are all getting better off. I have never heard such nonsense in all of my life and neither have millions of others!
Al, Via Email
■ Nike changing the colour of the St George flag on their England FC team shirts for this year’s Euros competition is disgusting. People can’t just change the colours of a country’s national flag.
All England football supporters should refuse to buy them and wear previous years’ shirts.
Elaine Smith, London
■ So much has been made of the multicoloured St George cross on the new England kit. It’s ridiculous. People need to ask themselves if they’re genuinely upset by it or are just following the herd. It’s not a big deal. I don’t remember anyone kicking off like this during the 2012 London Olympics when adidas changed the Union Jack flag to all blue.
Reece, Buckinghamshire