Pandora

Prawn politics

AS PREDICTED in Pandora's Tuesday diary, the Boy Wonder and his speechwriters, after opting for take-away curry rather than pizza, delivered a scorching attack on the EU in Paris, full of flaming metaphors. Warning about the dangers of further European integration, Hague said, "One could find oneself trapped in the economic equivalent of a burning building with no exits." Good grief, what fervour! Pandora could surely use some of that cooking to spice up the diary, so a call was placed yesterday to the Kundan curry house near Smith Square. Yes, confirmed Nayab Abbasi, the Tory leadership are regular customers. What does the Boy Wonder usually order? "Prawn curry, medium, and other standard dishes. We serve exceptionally A-class dishes from India and Pakistan." Was John Major also a regular. "Oh yes, and he likes our prawn curry as well." Clearly every Eurosceptic in the land will want to keep their fires of indignation stoked with occasional prawn curries from the Kundan. (Pandora didn't have the heart to tell Mr. Abbasi that, while Hague's speech got A-class treatment in British newspapers, the conflagration was totally ignored by the French media.)

Doff the cap

AT THE Lisson Gallery on Tuesday night, Vogue celebrated its new "Best of British" issue. While it was no surprise to see most of London's fashion world, along with Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit, Pandora looked in vain for Peter Mandelson, whose ultra-fashionable (one must assume) figure graces one of the mag's pages. However, cover girl Kate Moss made a stunning entrance. Pandora salutes the Venus of Croydon for her stalwart party spirit. After a controversy surrounding her departure from the pretentious Hotel du Cap in Antibes last week, supposedly on account of a wee bit of 6am joviality, the supermodel might have been tempted to keep her beautiful head down. Not a bit of it. Tuesday night she was overheard telling a friend, "If it's such a high-class hotel, what is it doing talking to the newspapers?" Pandora could not agree more. At next year's Cannes Film Festival the Pandora entourage will avoid the "Cap" like the plague.

Fake nerd

"HELLO EVERYONE. And thank you for signing up for my Beta E-mail Tracking Application or (BETA) for short. My name is Bill Gates." Thus begins an e-mail that has been arriving on thousands of people's computers for months. It offers $1,000 and a free copy of Windows 98 to "the first thousand people" who receive and forward the message. Readers be warned. "It has nothing to do with Microsoft," a company spokesman told Pandora yesterday. "Some clever hacker launched this forgery."

G-whizz

MEN AND WOMEN who, like Pandora, are keen to bring part of the "James and Emma experience" into their own homes have been frustrated to learn that "that dress", which readers of the tabloids will know revealed so much of Emma Noble's curvature, is a "couture" number by Julian McDonald and costs pounds 2,500. That's a bit out of reach for most of us, but what about Emma's g-string knickers? Every true "J&E" man and woman would like to know where Emma bought them and what they cost. Presumably it wasn't a four-figure sum. Pandora is offering a bottle of champagne to the first fashion-knowledgable reader who can supply this information (validated please) for the benefit of all.