Why is Liz Hurley - part-time model, actress and producer - famous? Because when it comes to starring in a media circus, she is without peer. Let us imagine that 100 miles north of Anchorage, Alaska, there is a little town called Moose Tooth.
When the air base was still open, a few miles even further north into the snow and ice, some of the ground crew for the supersonic delta-wing bombers would come into town on Friday nights to tie one on, and the population of Moose Tooth, in order to service this sparse traffic, gradually climbed from 126 people to 214. Then the base closed and Moose Tooth shrank again to its present size. There are 73 people over the age of 21 and most of the kids who go away to get educated never come back.
It's headline news in the single sheet local paper when one of them does. Nothing happens in Moose Tooth, or it didn't until this week, when it was announced that Moose Tooth would be one of the few places in the world where Elizabeth Hurley would not be staging part of her marriage celebrations. Another place was the two-house town of Bindiai, South Australia, population four people, but Bindiai never had a prayer because it hasn't got a newspaper.
Moose Tooth, as we have seen, does have a newspaper, the Moose Tooth Truth-teller, and therefore it was in with a chance. A cruel deprivation, then, that Liz Hurley and her husband Arun Nayar probably won't be turning up. Indeed, we should be serious here and concede that this wedding has been a comparatively modest affair, mainly confined to parts of Britain and most of India.
The British part of the wedding, the opening ceremony of the ceremony, as it were, took place, as you may have heard, at Sudely Castle in the Cotswolds. Paparazzi from all over the planet gathered around the outer perimeter of Sudely Castle to be told to their surprise that they would not be allowed in. Psychologists are baffled as to how so many otherwise intelligent adult males equipped with expensive cameras could harbour the delusion that the couple about to be married had not done a deal with Hello!
magazine and that they, the paparazzi, would be allowed in. Was it a collective delusion that they would all be allowed in, or was it an individual delusion, multiplied by the number of paparazzi present, that they would each be allowed in, one at a time? Was it possible, scientists wondered, that Signore Massimo Intrusione from the distinguished Italian foreign affairs magazine Il Pesto honestly envisaged a scenario in which a heavily-built security man would say "Seeing it's you, Massimo, come right in.
Miss Hurley's waiting for you beside the swimming pool in a vestigial bikini. Kir Royale?" But the paps, as always, were prepared for a long siege with nothing to sleep in except a ditch.
These are men whose digestive systems are in a state of training beyond anything demanded of the SAS. These are men who can sustain life on a cockroach fry-up while they wait for a shot of Pete Doherty falling out of a window at the Priory.
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