Gordon in the morning: Terror!

The photo is, unmistakably, of Lily Allen. The headline is unequivocal:

Lily Allen's kidnap terror

Blimey - what has been happening overnight, then?

It turns out it wasn't actually her terror, or her kidnap, but the kidnap of a friend. About six weeks ago. And most of Gordon's story underneath is not about kidnap - of Allen or her acquaintances - but, erm, about the GQ Awards. A glittering affair, it seems:

[M]y quote of the night goes to PRIMAL SCREAM star MANI.

Collecting the Band Of The Year gong from ELLE MACPHERSON, he said: “Fucking hell, a giraffe in a dress. Nice one.”

And, yes, alongside Elton John's "Amy Winehouse can't be with us, but we must crack on" gag, "ooh there's a tall woman" probably did sound like sparkling wit.

Still, I'm sure GQ will be delighted that their expensive awards bash has generated, erm, acres of coverage about Lily Allen's mate being kidnapped.

Elsewhere, Kate Moss has had a small anchor tattooed on her wrist:

I’m not sure what it’s supposed to symbolise – maybe it’s because she has spent the summer sunning herself on boats.

Or maybe it’s some sort of rhyming slang for ex PETE DOHERTY.

Yes. Maybe it is. I know when I've had a public, painful break-up, my first thought is "how can I scar myself in a random way to remember him by?"

Blake taken to a place of greater safety

Once again, Gordon is kept apart from the big story of the day: that, having failed a drug test, Blake Fielder-Civil has been put on a less laid-back remand regime.

Curiously, the failed drug test was mentioned in Rav Singh's Amy Winehouse kidnap plot story in yesterday's News of the World, but Singh lost the point in his excitement to extrapolate the possibility of Winehouse being bundled into the back of a taxi and held in a barn in the woods.

Tartly, the Sun refuses to even mention Singh's kidnap plot tale.

Amy Winehouse "kidnap plot"

Last week, the News of the World revealed how Amy Winehouse is going to kill herself in prison as she serves a life sentence. This week, Rav Singh has an 'exclusive' about the kidnap of Winehouse, carried out by a gang of "jailbird villains":

GANGLAND mobsters are threatening to KIDNAP troubled rock star Amy Winehouse unless they get a ransom of £100,000.

Usually, of course, the ransom demands come after the kidnap, but then the news story usually follows the actual kidnap.

It's very brave of Rav to publish a "pop star at heart of kidnap threat" story in the News of the World after the last one. You might recall when the Victoria Beckham to be kidnapped story came to court, the whole thing collapsed when it turned out the paper had paid £10,000 to a convicted criminal for the inside details:

The judge said on Monday he was minded to refer the whole matter to the Attorney General "to consider the temptations that money being offered in return for stories concerning celebrities give rise to".

Still, we're sure that Rav's impeccable sources - "our man on the inside" of the jail where Blake Fielder-Civil has supposedly been getting these threats - has got all the facts straight and hasn't cooked up the whole thing for a cash payment.

Boy George tied up in knots

More misery for Boy George this morning, with a "male escort" claiming that George chained him to the wall and whipped him with sex toys.

Auden Carlsen tells The Sun that he agreed to go to George's flat after being contacted through Gaydar - but he insists that he only went, at midnight, to "pose for photos" and not "as an escort". As if "as an escort" wasn't already a euphemism - as in "I'm not behaving like an escort on a first date."

Carlsen's testimony is a little florid:

“It’s ironic that his biggest hit was Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? — because I’m sure he did want to hurt me.

“I was convinced I was going to die.”

So, you're convinced you have just escaped being murdered and yet you're making little puns up for the paper about it?

Carlsen said: “George said he was popping out for milk at 5am. I heard him come back and I walked into his bedroom wearing just my white underpants and a T-shirt. I was jumped on by George and another man.

“George handcuffed me to a hook by the bed as they held me down.”

He said George got rid of the blond man then produced a box of whips and sex toys — telling him: “Now you’ll get what you deserve.”

Apparently, Carlsen only survived this death-by-dildo by "pulling a hook from the wall" and running to a nearby newsagent to raise the alarm.

The Sun reports that George "was taken to a police station" - curiously, no suggestion he was arrested and, even more curiously, no quote from a police spokesperson to stack up the story.

Let's get Dizzee

It seems that, when he started to be a bit successful, former friends of Dizzee Rascal plotted to kidnap him:

“They were meant to be my friends. But when you start to make a bit of money, people switch on you.

“They get the wrong end of the stick. They think you’re this or that, but really it’s that they miss you.

“And because of the kind of people they are, they don’t deal with it properly. They respond with violence.”

We love the idea that "yeah, they wanted to put a sack over my head, stick me in the boot of a car, drive me to a shed in the middle of Norfolk and leave me chained to a lathe, but it's because they missed me."

The plotters apparently thought that the record company would pay a large sum for the safe return of Rascal. Which seems a little optimistic - his label seemed reluctant to pay for a decent advertising campaign for the records, never mind top kidnap pay outs.

A mother's worries

If your daughter had been the target of a kidnap plot, and was left nervous and afraid, it really would be the kindest thing to ring up Heat and say "I think she needs to see a shrink", wouldn't it?

All part of the healing process.

[UPDATE - added 19/11/07: Just to clarify, this post was about the alleged plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham and her children, which made sense when the original link to an Ananova story was still live.]