Diary: England star to burger man

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Peter Crouch's Pringles commercial is surely the least dignified of the current England team's advertising appearances. But we can safely laugh at the foibles of today's Premiership players – they have multimillion-pound sponsorship deals to mitigate the hurt of our mockery, after all. There's tragedy, however, in the tales of those former England stars reduced to selling unbecoming brands to supplement their dwindling memorabilia sales. Terry Venables sings for his supper to sell The Sun. John Barnes raps (again) for Mars. And, worst of all, we've learnt that Gordon Banks is promoting Gourmet Burger Kitchen's World Cup Menu by agreeing to let the burger chain rebrand itself as "Gordon Banks's Kitchen" for the duration of the tournament. Banks was the man between the sticks in 1966 when England lifted the World Cup, and perpetrated perhaps the finest save in football history (from the boot of Brazil legend Pelé in 1970, non-fans). Now he's flogging chunky fries. What are you doing, Gordon?

* Nick Clegg's drive to restore democracy to this great land clanks onward. Last Friday he arrived in Hull West and Hessle to explore voter apathy in the constituency, which had the lowest turnout at the last election. Only he was in the wrong city. Clegg, reports the Yorkshire Post, was convinced that Hull West had persuaded just 45.7 per cent of its eligible constituents to the polls. Unfortunately, the numbers were based on a balls-up by the Association of Election Administration, and 55.1 per cent of the constituency had, in fact, helped to re-elect former Home Secretary Alan Johnson. The Deputy PM should really have been in Manchester Central, where a mere 46.7 per cent turned out to return Labour's Tony Lloyd to Westminster. "We always suspected something was wrong with the voter turnout statistics for Hull West," Johnson told the Post. "I told Nick Clegg [this] before he visited Hull under the misapprehension that the constituency had the lowest turnout in the country, and we now know it didn't even have the lowest turnout in Hull."

* After the Labour leadership hustings on Wednesday evening, David Miliband chose to tweet one of the many less-than-memorable soundbites he'd employed during the debate: "Key issue: to turn poetry of values into prose of real change." Indeed. And who, pray, has been especially guilty of this "poetry of values" guff? Why, David's brother Ed, of course. Confirming his candidacy in The Mirror on 17 May, young Ed used the word "values" three times. By 1 June, he was rolling it out five times in a piece for The Guardian. And on the day of the hustings, he used up a full eight of his allotted 600 words (in The Mirror again) on "values". Enough poetry, Ed. Time for some of that prosey, changey stuff.

* Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams is to present his wisdom on the ethics of today's economy in a book due out in September. " Crisis and Recovery," publisher Palgrave Macmillan told The Bookseller magazine, "explores the ongoing global financial crisis and the moral and ethical leadership in society, including topics such as investment banking." Anyone who thinks the leader of the Church of England wouldn't know his economic onions should think again. The Church Commissioners recently announced a 15.6 per cent return on the CofE's investments during 2009. Not too shabby.

* No doubt you've been wondering what model-slash-WAG Danielle Lloyd has been up to recently. No? Well, her publicists want to tell you anyway. In the last year, she has got engaged, got pregnant, and got herself photographed nude – while pregnant. Plus, the face of Freemans lingerie (a title that failed to impress this newspaper's fashion department) has, says the press release, "inked a deal as the face and body of a global skincare brand renowned for eliminating stretch marks". Ms Lloyd is also "writing her first biography, to be published in 2011". A biography of whom, we wonder? Someone famous, probably.

highstreetken@independent.co.uk