Monday
How much money would it take to stop you saying something out loud that you really wanted to say? The question is moot for most of us, but for Donald Trump it is, we know, a tried and tested principle, the answer to which lies somewhere north of $5m and south – on the evidence of the weekend – of $83.3m. That is the combined amount of compensatory and punitive damages sanctioned against the former president by a jury in New York on Friday, for repeatedly libelling E Jean Carroll, including one instance last year when he libelled her on live television the day after losing the first libel case, with its $5m verdict.
Clearly, the figure wasn’t high enough to make him think before opening his mouth. In the days after this latest judgment, while Trump ranted on Truth Social – “our Legal System,” he wrote, “is out of control, and being used as a Political Weapon” – it is telling that nowhere has he mentioned Carroll by name or repeated the insults that got him here in the first place. He’s still Trump, of course, a man who muttered so disruptively throughout the trial that the judge himself observed: “You just can’t control yourself.” But for now, at least, he is silent.
E Jean Carroll and her legal team, meanwhile, have been taking a well-earned victory lap. “I’d like to give the money to something Donald Trump hates,” said Carroll to ABC News on Monday, adding bluntly: “If it will cause him pain for me to give money to certain things, that’s my intent.” This line landed poorly with the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who on her Sirius XM show remarked: “The joy with which they are celebrating this absurd verdict is stomach-turning.” Any further thoughts of Kelly’s on the subject will, sadly, never be heard, as her next statement – “joining me now: Glenn Beck” – triggered a collective lunge across America for the mute button.
Tuesday
It’s a fun game that enlivens the otherwise demoralised spectacle of the modern red carpet pre-show: who, as they say, is on the ’zem? Ozempic, the weight loss drug – or rather, the type 2 diabetes drug with appetite-suppressing side-effects – has cut a dramatic and at times startling swathe through public life, giving us the spectacle of Sharon Osbourne, 42lbs down, telling Piers Morgan: “I didn’t want to go this thin. It just happened,” and Amy Schumer swearing she’s never going on it again. “I think Trump’s been on the ’zem,” said a friend this week, and she might be right. Sunken face, foundation pooling in loose skin around the eyes, the classic Ozempic look: thinner, but not in a good way.
No such measures are necessary for Rishi Sunak, who, according to a source close to the prime minister cited in the Sunday Times this week, spends a 36-hour period each week fasting. Between the hours of 5pm on Sunday and 5am on Tuesday, Sunak reportedly sticks to a diet of water, tea or black coffee, a fast designed to trick the body into using more fat, or something. I’ll confess I haven’t gone too deep into the details, since I will never be doing this, but for reasons of national security I would urge the prime minister to eat a banana before trying to do politics.
Wednesday
If fasting is miserable, there is never a bad time in the news cycle for a yorkshire pudding-based news item. This one emerged from Scotland midweek, as attempts were made to recapture Honshu the monkey, on the run from Highland Wildlife Park since Sunday, using batter-based bait.
The pudding, made by Stephanie Banyan of Insh, a hamlet close to the park, was left out on Wednesday night expressly for the purpose of enticing the escaped Japanese macaque, without much hope of yielding a result. In the days after his escape, Honshu had proven Bond-like in evading capture, tormenting his pursuers by showing up in drone footage nibbling on a bird feeder in a man’s garden before fleeing for 45 minutes over hill and dale. Bold as brass!
It couldn’t last. On Thursday morning, Banyan looked through the door of her terrace to find a large, red-faced monkey staring back at her with the customary torpor of one who, in spite of himself, has eaten all the yorkshire pudding. Shortly thereafter, Honshu was shot with a tranquilliser dart by a ranger and safely returned to the park, where he is presently negotiating with agents to sell his story.
Thursday
The entire high-speed monkey chase might have been a sequence in Mr and Mrs Smith, the husband and wife spy caper, originally starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and rebooted on Amazon Prime this week starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine. I’m sure the show is going to be hilarious and cool, but I can’t help wondering what happened to cause Phoebe Waller-Bridge to walk from the original collaboration, and whether it had anything to do with the fact that Glover is 5ft 9 to Waller-Bridge’s 5ft 10.
Glover, who created the show, strikes me as the kind of male lead who might not enjoy collaborating with a female co-writer who is taller than him, so to speak, and his remarks to Vanity Fair last week – “She did Fleabag pretty much by herself, over years onstage,” he said, before implying his creative process was snappier – sounded like code for in-my-head-I’m-6ft-3.
Friday
Rolling your eyes is a microaggression, according to consultants hired by the civil service and reported in world’s-gone-mad tones by the Times this week. Anyone with children could have saved them the £160,000 fee to confirm the 100% inevitability of an explosive fight when one child microaggresses the other this way. And, of course, schools have long understood the power of the eye roll. Just this week, a kid called Zacky rolled his eyes at the teacher during PE, whereupon, per my child’s avid eyewitness account, Coach Chris said: “Roll your eyes one more time and you’re going to sit on the bench.” No recourse to HR necessary.
