Books, it’s often said, sell better in a recession – I imagine because reading is about the most cost-effective, convenient way to entertain yourself. £8 worth of paperback should always last several times longer than £8 worth of movie, with the best pictures in the book-reader’s head. As a writer who lives on royalties, I hope the maxim holds true this time round. But the most obvious winner currently emerging is the sale of condoms, up some 10%, with ‘sexual enhancers’ up 25%. Less predictably, Ocado, the home delivery service for Waitrose, have seen sales up by 60%. Food & sex, always reassuring in troubled times.

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Simon Cowell is not everyone’s favourite celeb – mainly because he’s (sort of) honest about the performances of the weeping wannabes who appear on X-Factor and his shows in the US.

But not being popular doesn’t make him eligible for having his Roller bugged by hacks employed, we may safely assume, by one of our inglorious Shag Rags (Sun, Star, Express, Screws, People, Mirror). Although we may deplore his taste in owning a Rolls Royce and having a hair cut like pan cleaner (is Max Clifford going to have a go at his crimper, too?) he, like every one of us, is entitled to his private life, and should have recourse to the law to protect him if the editors of the sad hacks harassing him publish any shots or other material of him going about his private business.

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On July 7th I blogged about the absurdity of a classic Screws front page fantasy headed ‘BURRELL: I HAD SEX WITH DIANA’, with a photo of the Princess filling the page.

At the time it was clear to anyone with any perception of the Screws version of the truth that the whole story was nonsense. They’d paid Burrell’s brother-in-law, a shifty little chancer called Ron Cosgrove to tell them that Burrell had told him (back in 1993) that he’d had sex with Princess Diana.

Popularity: 1% [?]