Diary: No way for a Lady to behave

(AP)

Fashion-based cat-fight news. When Lady Gaga (real name: Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) performed at Anna Wintour's Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute Gala last May, the two reportedly failed to hit it off, not least because Gaga was an hour late for her performance.

"Anna was none too pleased," Gaga biographer Maureen Callahan claimed. "She thought that she was just sort of behaving like a childish diva and not the professional who was about to perform for... incredibly famous designers and celebrities." Wintour made a rare chat-show appearance in September, and said the singer had been "waiting for God to tell her it was all right to go on stage".

But Gaga got her own back at the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards this week, where she appeared in a turquoise wig and "spike thong" (which sounds marginally more painful than it is) to accept a "Fashion Icon" award. Wintour texted to congratulate her icily on winning said award, Gaga revealed, but she mistook her for a different Anna in her contacts book, "so my reply was, 'Yes, bitch, we did it!'... I got a reply that said, 'How lovely.'" £6,000 handbags!

* Conrad Black's longish sojourn at the Coleman Federal Prison, in sunny Florida, was accompanied by tales of his caring and diligent performance as a tutor to less-educated fellow inmates. His lawyers claim his efforts were "nothing short of extraordinary... Few indeed could take credit for guiding more than 100 GED [General Educational Development] candidates to graduation, and Mr Black's work with his colleagues to more than double the number of graduates is truly commendable when one considers the difficult circumstances he faced."

Unfortunately for Lord Black, who is awaiting resentencing for fraud and obstruction, some of those who were present remember things a little differently. According to one prison officer, those "difficult circumstances" include an entourage of prisoners who cooked and cleaned for Black. Meanwhile, his educational supervisor, one Carrie De La Garza, is claiming that there was, in fact, a decline in prisoner-graduation rates during the Black years, and "of the three tutors assigned to my class during the time Black was an inmate... Black put in the fewest hours." Fiddling the numbers again, Conrad?

* Peter O'Toole, now 78 and the last "hellraiser" standing, made a surprise appearance at an Oldie lunch at Simpson's-in-the-Strand yesterday, where he set the record straight on one of the many anecdotes that still pursue him. The actor's late friend and colleague Beckett specialist Jackie MacGowran wrote in his memoir that while the pair were starving RSC performers sharing a room in Stratford, O'Toole stole two large goldfish owned by their landlady and fried them for consumption.

"That," O'Toole claims, "is a lie. It was Jackie who pinched the goldfish and put them in the frying pan, leaving the skeletons for our landlady in the morning. God, what an awful place! Stratford was a desert then." Mercifully, Simpson's served chicken for lunch.

* Noted performer Hugh Bonneville, star of Downton Abbey, almost went into the law, so attracted was he to the "theatricality" of the courtroom. "Fortunately, by my second year at Cambridge," he tells The Lady, "I admitted to myself that I wanted to be an actor. I think I did the legal profession a huge service by not becoming a lawyer – I would have been useless." (The legal profession is, no doubt, grateful.)

Despite enjoying the elevated public profile of a television personality, however, Bonneville doesn't relish the exposure that goes with it. In fact, he says, he has little interest in being associated with the thorny world of "celebrity", and barely even recognises the word. "It bounces off me... I think it is a vacuous word. I'm enjoying Downton, but I don't think it has changed anything about the way I approach my life, or my work." Glad to hear it.

* Señor John Bercow, Cuban-heeled Speaker of the House, may have unwisely dismissed the Daily Mail as a "sexist, racist, bigoted, comic cartoon strip", but Ed Miliband isn't nearly so foolish.

During his South Bank press conference yesterday, the Labour leader praised the paper for its coverage of the ongoing Southern Cross care crisis. Demonstrating his razor-sharp political instincts, however, Miliband moved swiftly to quell any potential unease among party loyalists, hastily adding: "But I don't want this to turn into a mutual admiration society for the Daily Mail." Never misses a beat, does he?

highstreetken@independent.co.uk