Cheryl has no one to blame but herself for being sent packing from U.S. X Factor

'Poor little me': Cheryl Cole during her short-lived stint on U.S. X Factor

Dare we hope that the latest tawdry twist in the dispiriting saga of Cheryl Cole — yet another British wannabe who has tried and failed to make it in America — will turn out to be one of the last gasps of the vacuous celebrity culture that’s defined the past decade?
In her way, she’s the perfect icon for the kind of shallow values that dominate too much of today’s culture.
Hers is a story of an uneducated and not particularly talented girl who managed to achieve her dream of becoming famous thanks to the twin requisites for female celebritydom today — an appearance on reality television and a relationship with an England footballer.
And now we’re witnessing the ugly fall-out, as Cheryl stamps her foot, bursts into tears and accuses the nasty boys of being mean to her.
The truth is, petal, you were playing in a very big game indeed — and you just weren’t good enough.
Yes, that’s hurtful and humiliating. But pulling the ‘poor little me’ line is both shaming and shameful, and you do women everywhere a terrible disservice by your petulance.
After all, feminists have spent decades arguing that women should be given equal opportunities to men. If you want to take them (as Cheryl did), it’s no use pleading for special treatment on the spurious ground that you are, after all, just a poor little woman at the mercy of those horrid powerful men.
Not that our ‘poor little Cheryl’ is above attempting to manipulate public feeling, I note. Make no mistake, this is a girl who’s tough as nails.
She grew up in a council estate in Newcastle, and left her comprehensive school aged 16 with few qualifications, having been suspended twice — once for fighting with another pupil and once for swearing.
Even a criminal conviction for assaulting a black attendant in a nightclub toilet didn’t slow her inexorable rise.

 

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• How rich is Cheryl Cole? (thisismoney.co.uk)

Girls Aloud were a sort of Noughties version of the Spice Girls and, just as Posh Spice had done before her, Cheryl became their most famous member by dint of going out with an England footballer — in her case the sleazy Ashley Cole.
On The X Factor, Britain fell in love with her curious mixture of plastic Barbie doll glamour mixed with Geordie warmth. With wearying and deeply depressing predictability, schoolgirls cited her in surveys as their most inspirational role model.
Now, three years on, she is once more in the headlines, but this time for a career failure. The Fox channel, which is about to screen The X Factor for the first time in America, has dumped her.
She reportedly hid in her hotel room, spurned offers of a top stylist and turned up for her first show in a disastrous outfit of orange top and purple flares.
She is now blaming Simon Cowell for her failure.
But America’s entertainment industry is the toughest in the world, run by ruthless moguls who don’t believe in running risks. The fact that they agreed to take on a girl none of them had ever heard of is testament not to her unique talent but to Cowell’s singular powers of persuasion.
Can Cheryl seriously think she would ever have had a shot at the big time in America without him? And doesn’t it occur to her that by persuading Fox to take her on, he was putting his own reputation on the line as well?
He’s an insomniac workaholic who has made a fortune by becoming a kind of celebrity Svengali to our infantilised nation. But he didn’t betray her. The only person who’s done that is Cheryl herself.
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SORRY to go on about The X Factor, but isn’t Simon Cowell missing a trick? It’s obvious to me who Cheryl’s replacement should be. Step forward Her Royal Hotness herself — Pippa Middleton!
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The proof pop stars don't have to be tarty
British singer Adele has a phenomenal voice and an average body — that is to say, she’s a size 16.

Pride: Adele lets the music speak for itself

At 23, she’s the same age as her rival Rihanna, and, like her, she grew up without a father — she was born to a teenage single mother, while Rihanna’s father left her mother after beating her.
But unlike Rihanna, Adele doesn’t do pornographic poses, wear provocative clothes or sing in praise of being beaten up by men.
Her second album, released in January, simultaneously topped the UK and U.S. charts and stayed at number one in Britain for 11 consecutive weeks, smashing the record of nine weeks previously held by Madonna.
Her record company boss, Richard Russell, says he hopes that both young girls and record companies will watch Adele and see that it’s not necessary to behave like porn stars in order to be successful.
I fervently hope so.
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A survey of 5,000 Dukan dieters in France found that 80 per cent of them regained all their weight, and its inventor, Pierre Dukan, is suing a rival who claims his regime is useless and dangerous.
I don’t know why he’s bothering. We’re all still awestruck by how fantastically svelte his diet’s most famous devotee, Carole Middleton, looked at the Royal Wedding.
So for the foreseeable future, I think anyone who wants to lose weight is probably going to adopt what I’ve decided to call the Carole conjugation: If Shekan Dukan, Ikan!

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Why does Sam let him dress so terribly?

ENJOYING a half-term break with his family in Ibiza, David Cameron has been photographed yet again looking like an off-duty provincial bank manager in his trusty navy-blue polo shirt, leading to speculation that maybe his wife buys them for him in bulk.
But you don’t even have to know that Samantha Cameron went to a so-called ‘rave’ on her first night of the holiday to realise that her music and fashion tastes are as far removed from her husband’s as Pluto is from the Sun.
She was 20 when she first started going out with David Cameron. He wasn’t yet an MP but his work at Conservative Central Office had already marked him out as a rising star.

Style and error: The Camerons take a stroll on holiday in Ibiza

When he went to visit his girlfriend in Bristol, however, her fellow art students viewed him merely as a terminally uncool Tory Boy.
In the end, they married in spite of, rather than because of, these differences, and it’s clear that she’s never tried to make him change his style.
So the reason Dave looks unbelievably dull on holiday is because he buys his own shirts.
And my guess is that one of the main reasons their marriage works is because his formidably stylish wife lets him.
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It was deeply unedifying watching Brown, Blair, Major, Clegg and Cameron as they waited, seated in a row, for Obama to arrive to address both Houses in Westminster Hall last week. It was obvious from their strained, tetchy body language that Clegg and Cameron were irritated with each other; it now turns out they were arguing about the NHS reforms.
Meanwhile Brown, on edge as usual, tried and failed several times to open a conversation with a supercilious and bored-looking Blair. And poor old John Major, seated in the middle, was roundly ignored by every single one of them. How very, very glad he must feel to be out of it all.

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All a-flutter..

Apparently it’s a bumper year for clothes moths. The only remedy that finally dealt with our own — after hundreds of pounds spent on fumigation and dry cleaning bills — was pulling up every last bit of carpet in the house.
It may look chic but it’s not homely, and after five years I yearn for the soft feel of carpet underfoot. But as we’re still, astonishingly, a moth-free zone, I’m resigned to putting up with noisy, hard floorboards until someone devises a permanent solution.
Instead of inventing rubbish vacuum cleaners can’t someone like James Dyson do something really useful and come up with something that eradicates moths forever?

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If women ruled footie 

It's already been suggested that if women had been in charge of the banks, the world would have avoided financial meltdown. So I humbly submit that it’s time we took over the mess that is world football and start running FIFA.
For a start we’d get rid of the President, Sepp Blatter, for the simple reason he’s clearly a total creep. We’d make footballers give a minimum of half their ludicrous wages to disadvantaged young people in their countries, and force each team to mentor children in deprived neighbourhoods. We’d ban spitting and those silly hairbands, too.
Oh, and we’d change the name to FIFI. Sounds so much prettier.