Lucy Mangan on the people in the media spotlight in the past seven days
Bad to worse
George Osborne
Don't know if you've heard ? there was a budget. Motorists can look forward to changes that will knock about �3 off the price of a full tank. Personal allowances will increase next year. Growth predictions for the next couple of years have been revised from bad to worse. Council tax has been frozen, which is good news for people paying it but who never leave the house or access any municipal services. Private jets will have to pay passenger tax, which has to sting.
Georgie-Porgie basically kissed the middle classes and made them cry a little less. The rich are still laughing all the way to the bank, the poor are still, well, you know, not. Thus it was, is now and shall be ever more.
It's her party
Carole Middleton
Libya burns and Japan goes radioactive but there are still greater troubles close to home. It was reported this week that the mother of the world's most famous bride-to-be confronted the landlord of her local pub, which was planning ? and please sit down for this ? to hold a �15-a-head party at his establishment on the day of THE wedding. Posters advertise live music, a disco, BBQ and prizes for best royal wedding collage, hat and prince and princess.
Oh, the vulgarity! When will people realise that this is not a day for enjoying themselves, but for sitting with doffed caps around the wireless and marvelling with due reverence at the semi-divine mechanism that allows an anointed prince to lift a commoner to the realms of glory via one simple sacrament? Ordinary people, please ? get with the programme.
Bye bye begetter
Elizabeth Taylor
The eyes, the diamonds, the perfumes, the husbands, the drugs, the booze, the Michael Jackson, the beauty, the glamour, the money, the champagne ? She might not quite have been, as Richard Burton insisted when he saw her at 19, "famine, fire, destruction and plague ... the only true begetter" but you knew what he was getting at. And she was indeed "unquestionably gorgeous. She was lavish. She was a dark, unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much..."
Taylor died this week of congestive heart failure, aged 79. Wait for the season of tribute films to begin and raise a dirty martini in as heavily beringed a hand as you can muster to the greatest screen icon, beauty and actress of them all. Nobody did it better.
What we've learned
? Easter eggs will cost up to 140% more this year than they did last year
? The Bank of England is to double the number of �5 notes in circulation, to 800 million
? 13 children under the age of 10 have been granted UK shotgun licences over the last three years
? 40% of gastric bands fail
? The biggest student loan in England is �66,150
? and what we haven't
? What killed Knut the polar bear
What they said
"I think he's a wordsmith and a genius ? His turn of phrase is stellar. He's doing slam poetry." Publisher Judith Regan explains why she wants to bring out a book of Charlie Sheen's work.
"I look back and think, 'Oh my God, was it even a relationship?' It was all cameras and photoshoots. It's wrong to have a relationship based on that," Katie Price has an epiphany regarding her marriage to Peter Andre.
"On a night out I used to have a litre and a half of vodka, two Rohypnol ? Now I have a double vodka and I'm hammered." Goldie's body is now a temple.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/mar/26/this-week-elizabeth-taylor
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