Asked what his 1971 single American Pie actually meant, Don McLean used to answer, famously: "It means I don't ever have to work again if I don't want to." Lately he's been more explicit: the 69-year-old singer sold the original lyrics at auction the other day for $1.2m and the 18 pages of scribblings that go with the lyrics are full of clues, since confirmed: the jester on the sidelines is Bob Dylan, while Elvis is the king with the thorny crown. But who actually was the original Miss American Pie?
The answer, McLean told The Daily Telegraph this week, is Don Draper's wife. "I had the idea of the prom girl. If you've seen the show Mad Men, that Betty Draper perfection: she's got the hair done, the clothes are always immaculate, she knows all the rules of the social role, that kind of girl. All of a sudden it was bye' to a lot of things that had happened before." The song, in other words, mourns the passing of an era in American life.
So why did he choose to sell the box containing the song's lyrics now, after all these years? He's getting older, he says, and "nobody in my family has any kind of instinct for making money. They're good at spending it! When I go, I thought, they'll probably just throw the box out!" So, instead, he's made a little more money out of the song, which, he admits, changed his life. Good for him.
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Ethically sourced hatred for £19.99
Lots of post-election wailing and gnashing of teeth at The Guardian, as you'd expect. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett told us she sobbed about the Tories getting in, suffering "waves of despair, punctuated by panic, anxiety, paranoia, and fear. A profound weltschmerz and a curious lack of appetite."
Less hysterically, Suzanne Moore said that, though a Labour voter herself, she was brought up in a "working-class Tory-voting household" and that her middle-class colleagues at The Guardian were deluded if they thought families like hers had voted Tory because they were ignorant: they simply thought the Tories wanted them to get on in life. In The Sunday Times, Dominic Lawson contrasted this view with the views of other left-leaning columnists from affluent backgrounds.
But Moore's sensible views, said Lawson, didn't stop "something called The Guardian shop" appending to her column an advertisement for a T-shirt covered with a rat and the words of Aneurin Bevan on the Tories: "As far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin." The Guardian shop offers this expression of hatred from the Britain of 1948 for the price of £19.99, adding that the T-shirts for sale are printed on "ethically sourced Egyptian cotton".
Thus, says Lawson, "The Guardian turns a neat profit (it hopes) by exploiting its own middle-class readership's self-indulgent hatred of the alleged evil capitalists of the most popular mass party in Britain. Future historians should print this as a perfect (and perfectly hilarious) example of the delusions of the metropolitan British left circa 2015."
Tabloid money: the Beeb a hotbed of lefties? Don't make me laugh
Don't believe the right-wing view that the BBC is "a hotbed of lefties", says Kevin Maguire in the Daily Mirror. The truth is that the Beeb's studios are stuffed with "true blues, who mix socially with Dave, George and Boris". The "TV big earners told me they voted for the Cons as they were put off by Labour plans to tax them more, as well as the mansion tax". Anyone pretending this isn't the case is "either playing mind games" or needs to have their head examined.
What does George Clooney's new wife, human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin, make for dinner? According to Clooney, nothing more than "a reservation", says Vanessa Feltz in the Daily Express. "Sounds glamorous, doesn't it?" But I'm not so sure. Getting dressed up every night. Navigating menus of "crazy concoctions" when you'd rather be munching egg and chips. Having to make "sprightly conversation watched by strangers" when you feel like curling up on the sofa watching telly. "Cooking every night is a chore. Never cooking at all is an expensive bore."
The European Union, like all bad ideas, "carries the seeds of its own destruction", writes Tony Parsons in The Sun. The latest madness is the idea that European nations should admit anyone from "the Third World who fancies a new life" over here, "if they happen to float our way".
One "woman plucked from the Mediterranean" told the BBC she was a hairstylist from Nigeria. She might "prefer Luton to Lagos", but she's hardly fleeing unspeakable persecution. "The British are a big-hearted, generous people who never turn our backs on genuine refugees. But I don't think a Nigerian hairstylist qualifies as anything other than an economic migrant who should be stuck on the first plane back home."
