Claire 🇬🇧 💚🤍💜

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not live at all. In which case you fail by default.

[Canellecitadelle @Canellelabelle]

Lol, the useless drama...
"Oh why did William not grab her hand and be the gentleman? Why was it Tom Cruise? It is not good optics"🎪🤹‍♂️
William and Catherine radiate happiness and serenity and that is something that needs no explanation. They were here to support Tom Cruise and return the favour as Tom, generously, support them in their charities as well👌🏽
William and Catherine have been walking so many glamorous red carpets in their 15 years of marriage. WHEN has Catherine ever needed help down the stairs? NEVER.
The Prince and Princess of Wales acted yesterday as they always do, making their entrance, walking side by side, looking elegant and dignified🤩
Catherine has never had any trouble managing stairs while walking in heels; she can do it forward and backward without breaking her neck, imagine that...😏
She was calmly walking the stairs on her own yesterday, as she always does, WHEN Tom grabbed her wrist and insisted on escorting her down the stairs, to be a gentleman🤷🏽‍♀️
So no William did not need to hold her hand since she did not need any help. It is Tom who insisted on escorting her that way, because she is his guest of honour and he felt happy to cater to her🔥
That is the huge nuance that people need to take into consideration when they criticise Tom. William and Catherine were the guest of honors at the event and Tom went all out to make them feel welcome and comfortable.
There was no reason for William to act out of character JUST to prevent Tom from helping Catherine, what kind of insecure teenage idiocy is that?😵‍💫
William is a mature and confident man who is secure in himself and secure in his marriage. In the same way, Catherine is self assured in her Marriage.
EVEN IF Tom has a crush on Catherine and was a bit clingy for some, he did not disrespect her. He held her hand for less than 10 seconds, escorting her on the stairs and that was it
If you want to use protocol, taking selfies and giving hugs is AGAINST royal protocol as well. Yet, when W&C do that, I do not hear anyone complaining🥴
So just take a breather, and stop trying to insert drama in a beautiful event without any drama. Yesterday was a delightful event👌🏽
Now, to H&M bitter fans trying to cry that "this will never be Meghan, eing escorted by Tom Cruise, instead of her husband, you are absolutely RIGHT.
😂
Look at this event and the pictures very well: •Catherine and William were the guests of honors at the Premiere of Tom Cruise's movie, in the UK, this will NEVER be Harry and Meghan👌🏽
• Tom Cruise, who is an A-lister on every continent in the world, is fussing and catering to Catherine with adoration, because he is so please to see her grace his red carpet, No this will never be Meghan
• Actors line up ahead of time and wait for Royalty, William and Catherine, to stop by and chat with them. Meg is the hasbeen, who at 45 years of age, was publicly harrassing the production of "the Gentlemen" for an acting role, which they decline. Meg is trying to be an actress, Catherine is the future Queen for whom actors line up on the red carpet🤷🏽‍♀️
No this will never be meghan walking by the side of the Future King as his equal and his wife;
It will never be H&M being invited as guests of honor while the likes of Tom Cruise cater to Meghan, it will Never happen.
Catherine's life os the Princess of Wales will never be anything Meghan experience.
So we are in agreement. Let the jam seller and instagram influencer focus on activities that pertains to her level: make drama about WhatsApp messages and school runs and post on instagram, yes?🪭☕
#PrinceandPrincessofWales

[Daily Mail @DailyMail]

Mike Tindall reveals his rugby-loving father Phil has died aged 79 after long battle with Parkinson's https://t.co/VIXSoeeVbf

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

The Tories said: "A 58-year-old who has worked since leaving school at 18 would keep full benefits right up to state pension age. But a 30-year-old who has managed a single year of work since turning 18 would receive the lower rate after 6 months"

The sick, the disabled and those already in work will be exempt from the changes

Badenoch said: "Some will say this is unfair on people claiming benefits. What is unfair is a system where someone who can work chooses not to, and earns more from benefits than someone in a job.

"If you can work, you should work. Helping people into work is not punishment. The best welfare is a well-paid job. So, we will be tough on those who exploit the system because the current system is unfair to workers, taxpayers and those who truly need support. We should not be borrowing from our children and grandchildren to support people who simply refuse to work.

"Welfare must be a safety net for those who genuinely need it, not a lifestyle choice for those who can’t be bothered"

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: Kemi Badenoch says the Tories would introduce a "Back to Work" debit card for Universal Credit claimants fit to work

For every 2 years worked, they would get an extra year on full benefits before a 30% cut and a card blocking alcohol, cigarettes, gambling and cash

[James Blunt @JamesBlunt]

The name’s Blunt. James Blunt.

Tailored by @MrTabbs

[No Context Brits @NoContextBrits]

“He’s behind me, isn’t he?”

[Queer Lips of Truth II 🇸🇱🇬🇧 @QLoTII]

Let me tell you what happened in Leicester Square tonight, because it was better than the film.

The Princess of Wales has not walked a red carpet since May 2022. In between came the year the family does not discuss: the surgery, the diagnosis, the video from the garden bench, the chemotherapy, the months when the country quietly counted the days. Tonight she walked one again.

She wore purple. Deep plum, Jenny Packham, cut lower than she has ever dared, the colour of queens. Her hair was half up, so that you could see the earrings, and the earrings were Diana's pearls. At her throat, on a rope of pearls to the waist, hung an amethyst heart the size of a walnut. Queen Alexandra gave it to the Queen Mother in 1923, the year she married into the family. It has been worn through a war, an abdication and a century of clever men underestimating the women who wore it.

This morning a book went on sale calling that Queen petty and the King a lottery winner on the morning Diana died. The family's reply to a week of it has been one sentence. Tonight the future Queen answered without one: she wore the Queen Mother's heart and Diana's pearls at the same time, and let the flashbulbs do the talking.

And William. Black tie, half a step behind her on the carpet, in her light rather than his own, with the look of a man who walked behind a coffin at fifteen and has spent every year since making sure she would never be alone on a carpet, or in a hospital, or anywhere.

She looked magnificent. Not because of the dress, though it was perfect, and not because of the necklace, though it was a hundred years of the family on a single strand. She looked magnificent because she looked well, and happy, and unafraid.

The book will be in the bargain bins by Christmas. The amethyst goes back to the vault, until another woman wears it on another night for reasons nobody will need to explain. That is the difference between a family and a grievance. One of them lasts.

[Eddie Booth. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Nationalist @Sir_EdwardBooth]

Soulless and Depressing

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Stop treating the adult population like children and stop allowing adults who behave like despotic toddlers to decree what the rest of us are allowed to watch.

[The British Prince @freedom_007__]

Princess Diana and Prince William: copy and paste. He doesn’t need the hair — he’s got her face, compassion and mannerisms ❤️

[pau 🇦🇷 @pmwaless]

Nadie tiene derecho a minimizar tu dolor ❤️‍🩹

[Chris Rose @ArchRose90]

This is Thomas Jewitt, 32, who died after he was assaulted on the way home from Notting Hill Carnival.

"He was excited about marrying his fiancée next year."

Heartbreaking. @SadiqKhan will you ignore his death like you’ve ignored the 636 arrests at Notting Hill carnival??

[🤦🏻‍♀️ @chadasianwife]

Charles Spencer waited twenty-nine years, three divorces, and a publishing contract before deciding that a fifteen-year-old boy’s composure on the worst day of his life was a reason to treat him as the secondary concern.

I am seething.

In Swan Song, Spencer writes that William “looked more self-possessed.” Tall. Handsome. Dignified. The image of his mother. And because the child did not collapse in public, because he held himself together while the world watched, his uncle decided Harry was the one who needed the fuss. William’s maturity, in other words, became the justification for ranking him second.

That is not grief talking. That is a man who has spent decades polishing a narrative in which one nephew is the wounded prince and the other is the inconveniently functional one.

Spencer’s own words give him away. He admits he “cared deeply” about what William was going through, then immediately explains why that care was deprioritized. The greater composure made him secondary.

For a relative who claims to care, how completely insensitive.

The uncle who delivered the funeral eulogy about blood family and duty decided, on the train to Althorp, that the boy who most resembled Diana was the one who could wait.

Twenty-nine years later he puts it in a book timed for the 30th anniversary market. Convenient. Financially convenient — it’s sickening.

Spencer now presenting William’s dignity as a reason to look away first is not brotherly concern. It is narrative management. Harry gets the “lack of obvious care” chapter. William gets the “he seemed fine, so I moved on” footnote.

That is not how you protect a sister’s sons. That is how you pick a favorite and call it memory.

William’s composure was not a luxury. It was the only armor a fifteen-year-old had left. Treating it as the reason he came second is one of the colder lines in a book already dripping with score-settling. Some of us still notice when a man waits almost three decades to tell the world that the boy who held it together was, therefore, less urgent.

That boy grew up. He is still holding it together. While the uncle is dining on the tragic death of his sister.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Saudi Arabia's East-West oil pipeline has been damaged by drone attacks. The strait of Hormuz is restricted, Houthi bandits threaten shipping routes into the Red Sea. Another oil shock is coming.

Yet our Prime Minister and his Cabinet are behaving like a flock of ostriches, heads buried so deep in the sand they could strike oil themselves.

The answer is simple: DRILL OUR OWN OIL AND GAS IN THE NORTH SEA.

[Furiosa @Furiosa24]

Prince William, the silent son, remains dignified.

He knew his mother. He knows his father. And he knows all their flaws.

A prince who has a connection to British intelligent services and all their information has said nothing.

Oh he knows a lot!

But William is not a petty, vindictive twerp!

He is a king in the making.

I support this man.

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

Kemi Badenoch has accused Andy Burnham of “fiddling while Europe is at risk of burning” as Russia intensifies its hybrid war against the West.

Read this front page story here ⤵️
https://t.co/ygiT1eeRPj

[Carolyn Rockey @CarolynWRockey]

She was seventy-two years old. She was losing her hair. She was losing weight. Between takes, she sat alone in her trailer and felt, in her own words, like she wouldn't have minded if it all just stopped.
And then her cue would come.
She would stand up, straighten her costume, walk back onto the set, and become Professor McGonagall.
Her name was Maggie Smith. And in 2007, right in the middle of filming Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, she received a breast cancer diagnosis that would have ended most careers. She was deep into one of the most beloved film franchises in history. Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint — three young actors who had grown up alongside her on set — still had a full year of work ahead. The production schedule was not going to move.
So she made a decision that most people simply would not make.
She would do the chemotherapy. She would do the filming. She would do them at the same time. And she would tell nobody.
The chemo hollowed her out. Her hair fell out completely. The tight grey wig she wore as Professor McGonagall — that stern bun pinned high on her head — quietly became something else entirely: a cover for a head that had been stripped bare by treatment. Her castmates assumed it was just costume. Not one of them suspected what was underneath it, or what was happening to her body between shots.
I was like a boiled egg, she said later, with the dry wit that had made her one of the great theatrical voices of the twentieth century.
The body beneath the joke was not laughing.
She finished the film. Then, instead of stepping back — instead of resting, recovering, disappearing for a while the way anyone would have been entitled to — she signed on for the final two films in the series. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Parts 1 and 2. During production, her immune system, already gutted by months of chemotherapy, collapsed again. She developed shingles.
She kept filming.
For two full years, she carried the secret entirely alone. No press release. No emotional interview. No carefully managed public announcement designed to soften the story and build sympathy. She simply went to work, did the job, and went home to be sick in private.
It wasn't until 2009 — after the filming was over, after the treatment was finished — that she quietly mentioned it to a journalist at the Daily Telegraph. The world, which had spent two years watching Professor McGonagall calmly hold the line at Hogwarts, suddenly understood that the woman playing her had been holding her own line the entire time.
The cancer was hideous, she said. It takes the wind out of your sails. It leaves you flattened.
She never returned to the stage. The chemotherapy had taken something from her that she couldn't get back. But at seventy-five, she walked onto a new set and into a new role: Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, on a little period drama called Downton Abbey. Her one-liners went viral before the word viral fully existed. Her perfectly timed glances became a language of their own online. She won two Emmy Awards. She became, as she put it herself with genuine amusement, somebody people actually recognised.
I'd led a perfectly normal life until Downton Abbey, she once said. Nobody knew who the hell I was.
She kept going. At eighty-eight years old, she was still taking roles, still showing up, still doing the work. In September 2024, Dame Maggie Smith died peacefully in a London hospital, three months before her ninetieth birthday. Her sons noted that she had remained intensely private to the very end. King Charles called her a national treasure. Daniel Radcliffe said the word legend was overused — but that it applied to her completely, and without question.
She spent fifteen years working after a diagnosis that should have stopped her. She asked for no credit, no sympathy, and no accommodation. She just kept showing up.
The role the world knows is Professor McGonagall.
But the real performance was something else entirely.
It was a seventy-two-year-old woman, bald beneath a wig, walking back onto a film set because the job wasn't finished yet.
That was Maggie Smith.

-The Real History of America

[Marcus @Marcus___007]

After tonight's Strictly, the bookies have revealed they think the celebrity least likely to make it to Blackpool is Josh Widdicombe.