Liz Hurley takes the Brexit whingers to task

published 15 July 2016

802-Hurley-1200 — "I cannot be talked down to by someone who has slept with Shane Warne"

I've lost count of the number of families I've talked to who voted in different waysin the referendum. How interesting to find that the same behaviour was going on at the top of Ukip. Aaron Banks, 50, the party's biggest backer, and possible successor to Nigel Farage, donated a staggering £6.5m to Leave.EU, a sum so big, says Rosie Kitchen in The Sunday Times, that even he seems surprised by it. "It just sort of happened," he says.

Revenge appears to have played a part. A lifelong Tory until David Cameron "did this let's move to the central ground and all be liberal'", Banks defected to Ukip in 2014, and was about to give £100,000 to the party when William Hague remarked that he had "never heard of him". In a fit of pique Banks suddenly decided to raise his donation to £1m.

His Russian (second) wife, Katya, however, doesn't share his ambitions. Once rumoured, falsely, to be a Russian spy prompting her husband to buy her the number plate X MI5 SPY she is no lover of Ukip. "The south Gloucestershire Tories have got to her," Banks admits. Moreover, it seems that his daughter, who graduated from Exeter University with a first in bioscience, voted "remain" in the referendum. "She says to me: You don't know what you're talking about I'm better educated'. Which is possibly a point."

Subscribe to MoneyWeek

Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE

Get 6 issues free

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/mw70aro6gl1676370748.jpg

Sign up to Money Morning

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

We're likely to hear a lot more from Mr Banks in the near future. He warned in his Sunday Times interview that if Theresa May becomes prime minister, "Ukip will be back and on steroids". And he has plenty more millions to pour into it, however much his wife and daughter may object.

Mr Grumpy ties up EL James in budget worriesEL James has taken to spending a lot of time in America, reports Alison Boshoff in the Daily Mail. It seems her erotic fiction is less subject to "snobbish criticism" there than it is in Britain.

And it was on the East Coast of America that Fifty Shades of Grey first took off, after Random House gave James a publishing deal and she was suddenly said to be making £900,000 a week. But at home in Ealing, west London, her husband, Niall, who she calls "Mr Grumpy", keeps her feet firmly on the ground. He is wont to remind her to use the house Wi-Fi rather than clocking up data charges on her smartphone. She finds this "exasperating", says Boshoff. "As you might if you are worth £50m and rising."

Liz Hurley takes on the Brexit whingers

Sunday Times columnist Camilla Long takes Liz Hurley to task for her attack on "post-Brexit whingers" and those who pour "elitist" scorn on the "ill-educated Neanderthals" who voted to leave. "You are showing yourselves in all your mean-spirited, round-headed, elitist glory," says Hurley. "What an unappealing lot you are."

Is this the same Liz Hurley who admitted six months ago that she hadn't been on a train since 1985, wonders Long. "Is this strident defender of ordinary decent people this thong-propelled firebrand the same woman who calls non-celebrities civilians'? I'm sorry, but I cannot live in a world where I am talked down to by someone who has slept with Shane Warne."

Westminster gossip Farage is denied his Maggie

Nigel Farage couldn't have been more delighted that the new prime minister would be a woman. "Given that the policies of the last one saved the country from decline and political melancholia, the auguries are good," the departing Ukip leader chirped in The Mail on Sunday. Too bad for Farage he didn't get the one he wanted. He lauded Andrea Leadsom, before she pulled out of the race to succeed David Cameron, as "open, straightforward and even friendly". Theresa May he had always found "very cold". "Mrs May might as well be made of alabaster," he wrote.

Still, May shouldn't take too much notice. Suzanne Evans, the "best known" female Ukip politician vying to lead the party, doubts Farage's feminist credentials: "Nigel projects himself as the cheeky chappy down the pub, but it's not very female-friendly".

Besides Farage, there were probably few people more sorry to see Andrea Leadsom quit the Tory race than Labour's Angela Eagle. The former minister had delayed launching an official leadership contest to oust Jeremy Corbyn, fearing the Conservative power battle and the Chilcot Report would grab the headlines, says Craig Woodhouse in The Sun. What she didn't factor in was Leadsom's bombshell, which came during Eagle's launch event.

As senior journalists rushed away to cover the breaking news, Eagle was left alone, "repeatedly calling on reporters to ask questions only to find they were not there", says Woodhouse. "Anyone from the BBC," she was heard to ask, only to be met with awkward silence. "BBC anyone? No? OK, Robert Peston, where are you?"

Bank of England governor Mark Carney was "uncommonly batey" when he appeared before the Treasury Select Committee, says the Daily Mail's Quentin Letts. Carney blushed at allegations that the Bank had indulged in predictions of economic gloom and voter bullying before the EU referendum. Asked by Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg if he would behave in the same way during a general election, Carney snapped, "This was a single, binary decision and irrevocable". "Well done, Jacob," says Letts. "You got under the smooth fool's skin."