The Londoner: Mann's Korea high with Kim Jong-il

John Mann rubbed shoulders with the DPRK / Elle Goulding cuts ties with Core / Amal Clooney joins fashion pals on Sloane Street / 
Old friends: Kim Jong-il:
Getty Images
15 June 2018

A curious revelation from Labour’s John Mann on Question Time last night. While the panel were discussing the US-North Korea summit in Singapore earlier this week, Mann mentioned he had his own connection with the DPRK.

“I once met Kim’s father,” he told the audience. “Only in passing, and he was like him. Strange family. Strange people.” Given North Korea has hardly been a feature on MPs’ list of destinations in recent decades, this puts Mann (far left) in a pretty niche group who can claim to have met the former “Supreme Leader” (left). The normally unruffled David Dimbleby was at least a little taken aback by the news.

“How did you meet him?” he asked. “Erm. It was at a conference,” Mann said.

“You know. No one was talking to me, and no one was talking to him.

“So I went and had a word with him. He was there with his aides.

“This was before he was leader – when he was the heir apparent, as he was for half his life, and he was a very strange person.”

Kim Jong-il effectively became leader of North Korea in 1994. There certainly isn’t a record of the two speaking on a panel together and it does lead us to wonder how Mann could have come across the famously reclusive leader of the Hermit Kingdom. They were hardly likely to have met at a TUC conference or at Brighton.

Perhaps the meeting dates back to Mann’s time as leader of the National Organisation of Labour Students.

Despite his subsequent work defeating Labour’s Militant tendency during the 1980s, this was certainly the time when Left-wing activists could find themselves being invited on jollies east of the Iron Curtain.

We reached out to Mann this morning to find out more but are yet to hear back.

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The Duchess of Kent laid a wreath to mark the first anniversary of the Grenfell fire yesterday, but she is contributing in other ways. Buckingham Palace has announced that she has returned to teaching, working in a primary school that teaches children from Grenfell. The children call her Mrs Kent.

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Katherine Jenkins’s baby son Xander had a good cry at this week’s Classical Brits. “Sir Bryn Terfel was in the dressing room next to me: he came into mine, took him in his big arms, and started singing a Welsh lullaby,” she told me. “Xander had no idea that he had the world’s best baritone singing to him.”

Amal dazzles at Valli shop party after revealing her spinsterhood fears

Fashion friends: Edward Enninful, Amal Clooney and Sabrina Dhowre
Dave Benett/Getty Images for Giambattista Valli

Human-rights lawyer Amal Clooney was on Sloane Street for the opening of Italian fashion designer Giambattista Valli’s first London shop. Last week Clooney was in Los Angeles, paying tribute to her tearful husband George Clooney as he picked up an American Film Institute Life Achievement Award.

“You fill our home with laughter and happiness and that’s even before the children have worked out that ‘dada’ is actually Batman, a talking fox, and friends with Mary Poppins,” she said after joking that, before she met him, she thought she was “destined to be a spinster”. “I think it’s incredible talent and character that got him here and these attributes also make him an amazing husband and father.” Vogue editor Edward Enninful was host for the evening, which was also attended by show designer Charlotte Dellal and model Naomi Campbell, fresh from her meeting with Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson on girls’ education in developing countries.

SW1A

Tory backbenchers are hearing that the SNP may be plotting their revenge on Theresa May for frustrating their devolution provisions on the EU withdrawal bill by voting against Heathrow’s third runway. Ian Blackford, leader of the SNP Westminster Group, below, did little to rebut the claim: “I’m not prepared to get into what we’re going to do over the next few weeks,” he told us this morning. “We will be taking it one step at a time.”

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Robert Buckland, solicitor general and Remainer, thought he’d done a deal with Dominic Grieve, the leader of the Remain rebels, when they spoke at 3pm yesterday that would’ve given MPs the power to veto a no-deal Brexit. At 4.45pm he rang Grieve, highly embarrassed, to say all bets were off. The clause had been watered down to make it toothless. Do we detect the cloven hoof prints of David Davis? Perhaps he is biting back after “fudge”-gate.

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Elle discards Core

Singer Ellie Goulding has cut ties with Core, a “reverse osmosis” water brand, which, it turns out, is just purified tap water with added minerals. She has previously promoted Core across social media platforms, but has now told a fan on Instagram she is no longer working with the brand. Did she decide that the endorsement clashed with her campaigning against single-use plastic and for ocean conservation? Or did Goulding feel discomfort with Core’s founder, Dr Luke, the record producer? Not a real doctor, he is currently embroiled in abuse claims, which he denies.

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