What has become of the “love rat” James Hewitt?
In the first of a new series, we seek to find out what has become of well-known individuals who have faded into obscurity or moved on into others arenas.
Our first subject, James Hewitt, will forever be remembered for two things: One will be his affair with Princess Diana. The second will be his “caddish” attempts to sell stories and information relating to this.
This dynamic American television personality and author was one of the first women to work in “hard news” and is best known for having hosted the Today show, the ABC Evening News, The View and 20/20. She grew up “in awe” of the famous people her father, a Broadway producer and nightclub owner, introduced her to, has been married four times to three different men and got chicken pox after ‘kissing’ actor Frank Langella at a New Year’s Eve party in Miami in 2012. Walters has interviewed everyone from Fidel Castro to Michael Jackson, but her March 1999 feature on Monica Lewinsky, watched by a record 74 million viewers, is indeed one for the history books. When she asked her subject: “What will you tell your children when you have them?”, Lewinsky replied: “Mommy made a big mistake”. At that point, Walters ended the show by stating: “And that is the understatement of the year”.
This child star has morphed via a stint on the Disney Channel and in boy band ‘N Sync into an internationally known singer-songwriter, actor, record producer, dancer and businessman. (more…)
If one spent $2,000,000 on cosmetic surgery, one would expect to end up looking fantastic. It didn’t quite work out in the case of the billionairess “Bride of Wildenstein,” though, as instead she discovered the husband she thought she’d please in bed with a 19-year old Russian. Feline like in appearance, the purr of this New York socialite is said to be just as bad as her bite. She’s known to be a skilled hunter and pilot and once boasted her telephone bills were at least $60,000 a year. Surprisingly far from camera shy, what on earth will she look like at ninety?
This Californian became a child star to help solve the financial woes of his family. He excelled in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and received a $15 million cheque for Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Aside from acting, he’s been in relationships with Carey Mulligan, Isabel Lucas and Megan Fox but it is bar brawls that seem to form a staple of his existence. LaBeouf was questioned by the Los Angeles Police Department after one at the Mad Bull’s Tavern in February 2011, thrown out of another called the Cinema Public House in Vancouver in October 2011 and lost his hat during another at the Hobgoblin in London, SE14 in November 2012. We somehow doubt this wild child will be transforming into a reformed citizen any time soon but we’re also betting his career will rocket.
This mouthpiece was born in Rettendon, Essex in 1958 and vents bile on all manner of subjects. Articles such as: “Why don’t more women moan like me?” and “Liz Jones’ baby craving drove her to steal husband’s sperm in ultimate deception” are frankly illustrative of why she’s so unpopular. After she got banned from the majority of fashion shows and her husband left her, she quit London for Somerset in 2007 to feed organic muesli to the rats in the barns of a 47-acre farm she purchased as her “rural idyll.” That misadventure came to a sticky end in November 2012 after she’d alienated the whole county by calling them, amongst other things, “smelly” and “faintly Amish.” Goodness knows whom she’ll choose to offend next. Phillip Schofield sums her up best: “She is inconsistent, bitter, nasty and unhinged.” Our advice: Just steer well clear of this acid tongued poison pen.
Matthew Steeples examines the truth behind Liz Jones giving up on her “rural idyll”
The Mail’s Liz Jones is a waspish woman who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Those who’ve paid even a moment’s attention to her bleating, will be familiar with lines such as: “Last week, my brand new £1,300 MacBook Pro broke” and “Phil Spencer wanted his £46,000 and he wanted it now!” She never stops talking about money and the size of what she both owns and owes.
In today’s Femail, Jones bores on about about how she feels “like a cross-dresser” trying out the Kardashian Kollection of clothing in a pointed attack on Kim Kardashian, but it was for her diatribe yesterday that she truly got the goat of the nation in “[bidding] a ferocious farewell” to life in the country in an article entitled “Goodbye… and good riddance!” 2,151 people have commented so far and most of them have been far from sympathetic.
When Upcott Farm at Brushford, near Dulverton in Somerset came up for sale in 2007 at a price of £1.6 million, it featured in an article by The Telegraph’s Caroline McGhie. The 5-bedroomed farmhouse came with a 2-bedroom annexe, a courtyard of barns and stables and 47 acres of land. McGhie waxed lyrical about the merits of moving to this location: “People come here for the peace and quiet, the night skies, the dramatic coastline, and they work from home,” she stated before adding: “You can find everything here, including butchers, bakers, afternoon tea and cake, fish and chips, an art gallery and a shop selling fishing tackle.” Of Upcott Farm itself, she concluded:
“This would suit a member of the new wave of buyers dubbed Droppies (Disillusioned Relatively Ordinary Professionals Preferring Independent Employment Situations).”
McGhie got it half right: Upcott Farm sold to someone who considers herself far from “relatively ordinary” and someone who is far from “professional.” The purchaser, however, was certainly someone who’d become “disillusioned” with what she’d bought and someone whose desire to be “independent” and create a “situation” just alienated all she encountered. The buyer, you’ve guessed it, was none other than Elizabeth Ann Jones.
Jones was born in Brentwood, Essex in 1958 and studied journalism at the London College of Printing. She became editor of Marie Claire in 1999 but was sacked, she herself suggests, for “listing in the magazine the freebies she had been offered in the previous month.” Here, it seems, began Jones’s obsession with all things material and here she also met an Indian BBC radio journalist named Nirpal Dhaliwal in 2000.
Jones married Dhaliwal but the union was to prove an “utter disaster” as he had affairs with women she terms “younger, dimmer [and] slimmer.” “I’m no racist” Jones was divorced in 2007 and said goodbye to her “3,000 square foot of Islington real estate” and “easy, if super-busy, London life” in favour of the green, green grass of Somerset.
Whoever’s side you see it from, five years of hell followed. Jones baited the locals and they grew to loathe her. She wrote columns and a book, The Exmoor Files, where she attacked them as “faintly Amish… feral, old and smelly” and another hack and neighbour, Jane Alexander of The Telegraph, responded: “Dulverton [was] positively fizzing with fury” after each and every publication.
Of the local restaurants, Jones stated:
“I have given up trying to eat out in restaurants here on Exmoor… It is still stuck in the Seventies, with only things in baskets and rum babas on the menu… If you tell the waiter you are vegetarian, you are stared at, incredulously, as if you are black.”
She whinged about her inability to find love:
”I will never, ever meet a man here in the middle of a moor, where even to be in possession of your own teeth is a bonus.”
And whined about fieldsports:
“I didn’t increase my popularity by being unable to pass a party of men and often children with guns, shooting rabbits and deer, without getting out of my BMW and saying: ‘Do you really have nothing better to do with your Saturday morning?’ The look of shock on their faces that I had the cheek to challenge them was priceless. I would stop, too, and shout at huntsmen on horses, galloping on tarmaced roads, one hand on the reins, the other clamping a mobile phone to their heads. ‘You will ruin your horses’ tendons!’ I would wail.”
Whilst Jones found little to like in her new community, they found nothing positive in her arrival either. Her dog was blamed for worrying lambs, and Jones’s inability to control it, locals say, was an indicator of the chasm between her life and theirs. In 2009, one neighbour went as far as to tell Danny Brierley of The Independent:
“We have got nothing in common with her, really. I think she may find it difficult to make any kind of life here now. She is not a very friendly person and we are all sick to death of talking about Liz Jones. A hatred has been building up for months. She is actually having a go at people and they are not going to tolerate that. She has feelings like all people, of course she has. But everyone wants her to leave and leave now. No one can make her, but we think she will go. I don’t see how you can live in such a small community with people who think that way about you.”
Matters came to a head when Jones’s precious black BMW convertible, “bought in 2005 for £26,000,” was pelted with eggs and teenagers fired shots at her letterbox with an air rifle. A local councilor even dressed up as her in the local carnival and yesterday Jones took revenge on those she blames for her “five-year prison sentence” and deprivation from Space NK, Cath Kidston and Illy coffee.
Instead, the article just shows the true reality of this bombastic harpy. The lines Jones penned speak for themselves. Country people don’t welcome someone who planned to “hack for miles across the open moorland in my Prada jodhpurs” anymore than the folk of Knightsbridge welcome Arabs treating their roads like racetracks. The gardener who had to endure Jones yelling “walk faster!” at him didn’t deserve such anymore than a bus driver in SW11 deserves abuse from his passengers. Jones concludes:
“I’m now a different person. I became so lonely. I would often get in my car, not just for the warmth, but for the kind voice of the satnav lady. I’ve learned that an amazing view and a pair of nesting grey herons are not enough to make me happy.”
Miss Jones bleats that she’s taken a £500,000 loss on Upcott Farm, which languished on the market at first at £1,900,000 and then £1,750,000 for three years. The “unexpected” sale of the property has given her the ability to “flee back to the city” but the locals and even the “Droopies” should be warned: there’s still 27 acres of the farm unsold and on the market at a price of £200,000. Halloween may have passed but the battleaxe in the Beemer could still call again.
Read yesterday’s “Goodbye… and good riddance!” article by Liz Jones for the Mail on Sunday at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2231033/Goodbye–good-riddance-During-catastrophic-years-country-Liz-Jones-greeted-gun-attack-relentless-abuse-Now-flees-city-bids-ferocious-farewell.html
To purchase Liz Jones’s book, The Exmoor Diaries, go to: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Exmoor-Files-Husband-Found-Rural/dp/0297854437
For more information about the remaining 27 acres at Upcott Farm, contact Strutt & Parker on +44 (0) 1392 976005 or go to: http://www.primelocation.com/for-sale/details/18314693?search_identifier=71cbb8a2fb43a12182bfa7b79b5de0a3
The Queen’s life in 3 minutes and 24 seconds
This week we must thank Dan Large for having alerted us to an amazing YouTube video showing Her Majesty The Queen’s life in 3 minutes and 24 seconds.
Created by “an old retired guy who likes to play with computers” named “HerBunk” and using the technological wizardy of FantaMorph, the video has attracted nearly 6,000 likes and 300 dislikes. We look forward to hearing what readers of The Steeple Times make of it.
Watch the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8nJhG1xE5o&feature=share
Nicky Haslam adds another string to his bow
Nicky Haslam is a man of many parts. He’s best known as an interior designer and author but over the years, in chameleon like fashion, he’s variously styled himself as Liam Gallagher, bought a house in Transylvania on the net and once told Vanity Fair he’d rather meet Kim Jong Il than Nelson Mandela. Whether he’s partying with Paris Hilton or working with a Russian oligarch, Haslam’s character and charm always shine through and for good reason he tops the list of the most invited in the land.
Nicky Haslam’s life has been well documented in many a column but his latest move, recording a debut album entitled Midnight Matinée, can certainly be described as a bold departure. Yes, he did cabaret at Bellamy’s in 2009 and The Savoy in 2010 but having heard the first song, this truly does represent something akin to Kevin Spacey’s Beyond the Sea. I must admit that I thought it vastly superior.
Produced by David Ogilvy, who wrote the music for a BBC film about the interior designer, Total Control is the first in the series of songs to be released. It is accompanied by a video by a Canadian filmmaker named Douglas Arrowsmith.
We at The Steeple Times very much like Haslam’s “highly individual” foray into the “contemporary music scene” and for that reason make it our video of the week.
For more on Nicky Haslam and his interior design business, go to: http://www.nh-design.co.uk
Listen to Total Control and watch the accompanying video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyvmrswykXM
Music fit for The Queen
In recent days, Gary Barlow’s albumn Sing has topped the UK album charts with sales of 40,000 copies.
Two hundred and ten musicians, including the African Children’s Choir and the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force Band, helped record this special tribute to The Queen. Produced by Barlow with the assistance of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Gareth Malone, Sing also features Prince Harry on the tambourine, Hayley Westenra, Alfie Boe and the Military Wives choir. Sing will be performed this evening at a special concert at Buckingham Palace in the presence of Her Majesty.
Another tribute I was alerted to came from a singer named Anton Lorien who contacted me via Twitter. He was approached in 2011 by the British Monarchist League who asked him to produce a song for a lady he describes as having: “Given her life selflessly to the people of Britain and the Commonwealth.”
Mr Lorien’s song, Like A Diamond, is available to download on iTunes but I wholeheartedly recommend that you watch the video clip available above. It contains some wonderful footage of The Queen and the clip at 3:33 where our Monarch runs to watch her racehorse is especially worth seeing.
Both Sing and Like A Diamond capture the feelings of our nation brilliantly. Be sure to sing along tonight.
For more information about Anton Lorien’s Like A Diamond, go to: http://www.antonlorien.com
For more information on Gary Barlow & The Commonwealth Band’s Sing, got to: http://www.jubileesing.com