EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Keir Starmer’s new secret weapon: a lovesick diplomat

Educated at Tonbridge School on a salary of £46,740 a year, he is linguistically gifted (he is fluent in Arabic, Hebrew and French) and is a member of Brooks, the exclusive gentlemen’s club at St James’s, London.

So who better could Sir Keir Starmer recruit to the Labor Party in his bid to rid it of the far-left “comraderie” of the Jeremy Corbyn era than his fellow gentleman, the lavishly named Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, a former British ambassador in Saudi Arabia? Arabia and, later, Afghanistan.

Sir Sherard may already be deep in party intrigue.

‘Well, look, I’m in a meeting,’ he tells me. “I can’t talk right now,” she adds, before agreeing that a quick word may be possible a bit later.

Unfortunately, when I phone over and over again, his cell phone rings with no answer until he connects to a recorded message. Your wariness may be entirely understandable. “Starmer intends to put it in the House of Lords,” my Westminster mole tells me.

Though he is now 68, it seems Sir Sherard has a lot left to give, if his private life is any good. He noted five children from his wife Bridget.

But she remained at home, save for three brief visits, during her husband’s tenure as ambassador to Afghanistan.

Not long after, Sir Sherard had a sixth child on the way, a distressing development for Bridget, given that the unborn baby’s mother was Jasmine Zerinini, a French Foreign Office official who happened to be in Afghanistan.

Bridget, niece of the late actor Denholm Elliott, did not try to hide the pain it caused her after almost 30 years of marriage.

“It’s been a very upsetting 18 months for me and my five children,” she said shortly after Zerinini gave birth to a girl in 2012.

“We are all accepting the situation.”

Sir Sherard and Zerinini married months later. Will he and Sir Keir now come clean about becoming (political) bedfellows?

The Countess of Downton is the mother of the bride

As the Countess of Grantham at Downton Abbey, Elizabeth McGovern attended the wedding of her three daughters.

Over the weekend, the 61-year-old actress was proud to see her daughter get married in real life.

Screenwriter Matilda Curtis, 29, exchanged vows with a lawyer’s son, Nick Kemp, at Chelsea Old Town Hall in west London.

“Matilda is married,” a delighted McGovern declares, sharing this photo of the happy couple.

She has a second daughter, Grace, 25, with her husband, film director Simon Curtis.

Matilda is also an actress and appeared in the 2017 film Goodbye Christopher Robin, directed by her father.

Campbell is the most fashionable doctor in London

Many famous figures are grateful to receive honorary doctorates. Naomi Campbell, however, has gone a step further and started styling herself as ‘Dr’.

The supermodel, 52, has updated her social media profiles to call herself ‘Dr. Naomi Campbell’, despite never having studied for a PhD.

The University for the Creative Arts, founded in 2005, bestowed the honor on him last year.

On Monday, Campbell wore an £8,715 white puffer coat at the Moncler Genius show in Olympia London.

Surely he should have put on his cap and gown as well?

Cancel culture, that scourge of modern Britain in which a public figure is shunned for expressing a politically incorrect opinion, seems to have a supporter in the perky TV presenter Lorraine Kelly. When asked if she’s worried about being ‘canceled’ for saying the ‘wrong’ thing on a live broadcast, she replies: ‘I’m my own editor.’ He would never say anything mean. “I might laugh and joke with someone, but I would say most of the time people get canceled for very good reasons. We should all try to be a little nicer. Try saying that to those who have been ‘cancelled’.

The Bohemian Rhapsody movie set box office records and generated millions for Queen. But Police star Sting has no plans to follow suit or agree to a musical biopic.

“It’s something I’ve avoided because I think it’s lazy,” says the 71-year-old singer. “I wrote a musical from scratch called The Last Ship, about my hometown. [Wallsend]. I thought it was a much better way to use my time than just trying to fit my songs into some kind of bullfight fairy tale.

And he adds: ‘I haven’t succumbed to that yet. I may, but I resist.

Dua Lipa trusts Swiss for her healthy assets

Pop star Dua Lipa has opened a bank account in Switzerland to help manage part of her estimated £50m fortune and to have ‘credit facilities’.

The 27-year-old New Rules singer reveals the deal in documents recently published in Companies House for two of her businesses, which also show she could have a safe deposit box at Geneva-based Lombard Odier bank, which provides management of assets for the super. rich.

Ownership of Swiss bank accounts, which offer low levels of financial risk for clients and also high levels of privacy, is usually a closely guarded secret.

Orlando Bloom has revealed the secret behind the unusually harmonious relationship between his fiancée, pop star Katy Perry, and his ex-wife, model Miranda Kerr, with whom he has a son. “They’re bosses,” says the 46-year-old Lord of the Rings star. “We have a blended family, and it’s fantastic. We share my son, it’s a wonderful thing, and that’s the way the world should be, right?