elcome back to the Londoner’s Diary. First up Georgina Baillie, Andrew Sachs’s granddaughter, has revealed that Russell Brand helped heal the wounds caused by Sachsgate by sending her to rehab. And we bumped into Sir Rod Stewart and his wife Penny Lancaster at The Sun’s Who Cares Wins awards to celebrate the NHS last night but Sir Rod told us he was more of a private healthcare man. Also, Rishi Sunak tells us his Labrador retriever Nova has finally grown big enough to deal with the PM’s dog Dilyn. And Baroness Jenkin’s strikes a cheeky pose to advertise Second Hand September.
Live updates
Georgina Baillie, Andrew Sachs’s granddaughter, has disclosed that Russell Brand helped heal the wounds of Sachsgate by sending her to rehab. “He made it up to me because he sent me to rehab,” Baillie told The Londoner recently. She added, “I’m in recovery. I’ve been sober now for almost two years and… I’m fine.”
The late Sachs, who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers, didn’t speak to his granddaughter for several years after the incident that was dubbed “Sachsgate”. During a 2008 BBC Radio 2 show, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand left a series of lewd messages on Sachs’s answerphone and bragged about Brand having slept with his granddaughter. Ofcom fined the BBC £150,000 and described the voicemail as “gratuitously offensive, humiliating and demeaning”.
Now, Baillie says she has no resentment towards her former partner Brand. She also told us, when we spoke to her at members’ club Christabel’s, about another change in her relationship with her grandfather, who died in 2016. “I’ve actually done a few portraits of my granddad… It’s a really lovely except it was quite an emotional experience.” She added: “I felt like I was connecting with him in some way by painting these pictures.”