Like millions, I watched open-mouthed as Melania Trump delivered her frosty and furious bombshell message out of the blue, declaring: ‘I had no relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.’
‘What was that all about?’, I wondered. And then, more importantly, after Donald Trump declared he’d been ‘blindsided’ and knew nothing about it, why on Earth hadn’t she told her husband what she was doing?
A funny kind of marriage, I thought, where a wife fails to tell her spouse she’s planning something so momentous, let alone sharing with him the text she’s going to read out to the world.
Maybe there’s a perfectly innocent explanation. Who knows what’s going on between the President and the First Lady.
The only thing for certain is that Melania’s surprise statement denying she had any relationship with Epstein raised vastly more questions than answers. Questions we had not even thought to ask before she opened her mouth.
Why did she make the statement at all? And why now? Was she pre-empting something that was about to emerge into the public domain?
Are she and Donald Trump now living such separate lives she cuts him out of such a serious and explosive intervention? Is their marriage in trouble?
Was Melania’s dramatic lone stand symbolic of her relationship with the President? Was she trying to tell us something?
Or is she the devoted wife trying to save her husband’s skin, grabbing the headlines as his popularity sinks in the US over the war with Iran and his behaviour becomes more unhinged and bewildering by the day
How could she have kept it secret from him anyhow, as he claimed she had?
Her speech was delivered in the heart of the White House, for heaven’s sake, possibly the most security-conscious place in the world where every phone-call and footfall is likely to be monitored.
A mouse can’t crawl in there without the place’s epic tough-guys noticing and squashing it.
As a former spin doctor familiar with organising political broadcast events, albeit on a less grand scale, I know they take weeks if not months in the planning – lighting checks, sound checks, rehearsals.
Yet sources claim no one other than a couple of her inner circle of advisers knew she was even delivering her speech in the White House.
As I say, none of these questions would now be being asked were it not for Melania’s decision to go public on Epstein.
Apart from a few predictable weirdos on social media, no one had ever questioned the First Lady’s integrity over her dealings with him. Yet now she has lit a fire under her relationship with her husband and shone a spotlight on any association she did or did not have with one of the world’s most heinous paedophiles.
I’m still haunted by the image of her alone at the lectern delivering her speech, then defiantly striding off into the distance alone. What was Melania trying to tell us? Only time will tell.
Although given the firestorm her speech has unleashed, maybe she should have checked it with the Donald first.
Fashion for jibes
Having worked in my younger days at a fashion magazine in Sydney, I’ve never had any doubts about the way The Devil Wears Prada depicts the awfulness of vacuous, fashion-obsessed mean girls.
Alas, I was more like Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs in the film – skint and unfashionable. I never quite recovered from my editor berating my fashion sense and saying I let the team down, adding acidly: ‘You could be almost pretty if you weren’t so fat.’ I was only a size 12!
Slim chance we’d recognise Jack
Unbelievable that this recently unearthed photo is an audition picture of actor Jack Black aged 23 given he became the Jack the lad we now know and love – especially in 2006’s The Holiday, where he was much shorter and podgier than his co-star and love interest Kate Winslet. Today, he’s a lot bigger than he was even then, but there’s still something beguiling about him. I doubt if Kate piled on 10st, she’d ever work again.
Brooklyn Beckham is considering taking back ownership of his name ten years after his mother Victoria trademarked it, just as she did all her children’s names to protect their brands in the future. Jolly good, but given that he despises his family so much, perhaps the nepo baby should actually be dropping the Beckham surname – and becoming plain hot-sauce and sandwich maker Brooklyn Peltz?
Princess Anne made a phone call to disgraced brother Andrew, while Prince Edward visited him at Sandringham. No sign, however, of his daughters Beatrice and Eugenie, nor his ex-wife Fergie. They seem to have vanished now his life and finances have collapsed.
There’s a rather sweet ad on TV featuring golfer Rory McIlroy taking a putt and telling young people including his daughter to ‘never give up on your dreams’ and to work hard to achieve them. The sad truth today is most youngsters only dream of becoming millionaire influencers or instantly famous.
My moggie Ted is sceptical about the story of how Ukrainian soldiers rescued a cat and a dog by putting them in a bag tied to a drone, which flew them to safety. As Ted cattily pointed out, any dog in a bag with him would be dead before it reached the ground.
T, that’s tattoo tiny
As public declarations of love go, Euphoria actress Zendaya’s tiny ‘t’ tattoo under her armpit in homage to her fiance and SpiderMan star Tom Holland seems a bit understated. It’s so teeny it could be mistaken for a house spider.
Maybe it was out of respect, as Tom is very small.
I’d be happier for lovable ex-footballer and kids’ icon Peter Crouch – now worth just shy of £30million with model wife Abbey Clancy’s earnings thrown in – if he wasn’t also a brand ambassador for Irish bookmaker Paddy Power, payment undisclosed.
Why would a dad of four children with such a fortune go on TV to lure footy-loving youngsters into the world of gambling? Especially when it’s one of the most devastating addictions among adolescent boys.
Moon watch
I’m praying for a safe return for the Artemis II astronauts, but I can’t be the only one who didn’t stay up to watch them reach the far side of the Moon – epic as it was. It’s because I got so irritated by that screen hog Christina Koch. She was always grabbing the mic, her long hair flying about and obscuring the one person women really wanted to see, hot astronaut Victor Glover, the first black man to orbit the Moon who said modestly: ‘I’m not making black history, it’s human history.’
And for the selenophiles (Moon lovers) out there, yes I do know the reason hair flies upwards in space is to do with the lack of gravity. But hasn’t that attention-seeking Koch woman ever heard of a scrunchie?
Should we be worried about Jennifer Aniston?
She’s planning a wedding with her hypnotist boyfriend Jim Curtis and they’re looking for a home as they flit between her $15million and $12million mansions and his $1.2million flat. She’s also a devotee of Jim’s ‘regression therapy’ saying it proves they met in a past life and ‘their souls were destined to find each other again in this lifetime to complete their journey’.
May I suggest, Jen, that the first ‘journey’ you make is to an LA lawyer specialising in pre-nups.
Tell it Strait… Starmer’s a joke
It’s beyond parody that as Starmer appoints himself head of a group of European leaders working to open the Strait of Hormuz, the latest poll shows two thirds of voters want him to quit and call an election.
With his track record for failing to deliver on his promises, he’d struggle to keep a tributary of the Thames open.
