A champagne socialist

Gary Neville is unashamedly political: a vocal critic of the current Tory leadership, he is staunchly anti-Brexit, and he endorsed Labour at the last election. The premiership footballer turned entrepreneur is also very rich. He enjoys first-class travel, and sends his children to private schools. As a result, he gets accused of hypocrisy. But he doesn’t see any contradiction, he told Henry Winter in The Times. “People quite often call me ‘a champagne socialist’, and I say, ‘Yeah, you’re right, I am.’ People should be entitled to drink champagne if they want it. I believe everybody likes very good things, nice car, nice house, nice holidays and access to good transport, healthcare and education. The socialist part is that not only I should have access to that. I believe everyone should. I’m an entrepreneur. I believe you can use capitalist language and still be from a grounded place.”

Stanley Tucci was devastated when his first wife died of cancer 12 years ago. He and Kate had been married 14 years, and had three children. And though he is now happily settled in London with his second wife, literary agent Felicity Blunt, with whom he has had two more children, Kate is still very present in his life. Her name comes up time and again in his memoir, Taste, and in Searching for Italy, his cookery and travel show on CNN. He speaks of her lightly, without the awkward reverence often reserved for dead partners. “I can’t deny it,” he told Polly Vernon in The Times. “She’s just there all the time.” Death, he says, is confusing, “because there’s a part of your brain which still thinks that person is alive; it won’t let it go. So you have these thoughts that make literally no sense. Like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to tell Kate about the thing that Felicity showed me.’ It doesn’t make any sense. But these [two women], people you love so much, you feel, they’re just supposed to know each other. Or it’s, ‘Oh, I’ll have to tell Kate about what Matteo [his six-year-old son with Blunt] did.’ Or sometimes you think, ‘Well, Emilia [their three-year-old daughter] looks just like Kate.’ Then you think, ‘How could she look like Kate?’” He dreams about her all the time, and yet in his dreams, she is not nice to him. “She’s just very dismissive of me, and I’m always so happy to see her.”