She was thrilled when she found love with Rusty Egan, a pop star 28 years her senior, as I disclosed last year.
And just before Christmas, Georgina Baillie, the granddaughter of late Fawlty Towers star Andrew Sachs, revealed her engagement to the New Romantic singer, telling me they were ‘planning the wedding’, and that Rusty had given her an engagement ring containing a large sapphire ‘to match my eyes’.
But sadly, I can now disclose that the wedding has been called off.
‘I returned the ring a couple of months ago,’ Georgina, 40, tells me.
‘The age gap between us proved to be too much. I still adore Rusty so much and I’m sad, but he’s looking to retire to the seaside, and I’m not finished on my path to building my empire,’ explains the artist.
Georgina, who celebrated being sober for six years in February, is launching an online recovery and addiction show called ‘Hope’.
In 2021, she revealed Russell Brand paid for her rehab after ‘Sachsgate’, the scandal exposed by The Mail on Sunday in which the comic and Jonathan Ross taunted Sachs about Georgina’s relationship with Brand by leaving revolting messages on his answerphone.
They were played on Brand’s BBC radio show in 2008. Sachs, who played hapless Spanish waiter Manuel in the classic BBC sitcom, died in 2016, aged 86.
Georgina Baillie, 40, the granddaughter of late Fawlty Towers star Andrew Sachs, has called off her wedding to Rusty Egan, 68, co-founder of New Romantic band Visage
Rusty, 68, founded New Romantic band Visage with Midge Ure. He has a daughter with his first wife, Miranda, and three sons with his late second wife, Penelope.
Georgina said of their relationship: ‘Rusty helped me do things I never thought I could without using or drinking, like going to gigs.’
She says they remain close and still work together on Rusty’s live show, Sound And Vision.
‘Georgina and I had 18 lovely months together,’ Rusty tells me, adding: ‘The ring is [on] my desk… life is good, but with Georgina it was wonderful.’
Martha and Kimi’s not so helpful advice
Model Martha Sitwell and her pal Kimi Murdoch went viral for their fiery exchanges on Bravo reality series Ladies of London.
In one episode Martha told Kimi: ‘I love you, but you are a psychotic b****,’ to which she answered: ‘I know I am. That doesn’t make me a bad person.’
Martha Sitwell (left) and Kimi Murdoch, pictured at the Giffords Circus opening night, are starting a ‘podcast where they’ll give bad advice’
Now the vivacious socialites have a new medium to express themselves through.
‘We’re starting a podcast where we’ll give bad advice,’ Lady Sitwell, 46, pictured left of Kimi, tells me at the Giffords Circus opening night in London’s Chiswick Gardens.
The ex-wife of baronet Sir George Sitwell was joined by US-Haitian antiques dealer Kimi, who co-parents nine-year-old twins with her ex-husband.
‘We’ll be solving issues for people calling in who are just as clueless as us,’ explains Kimi, adding: ‘Martha will be the empathetic one. I’ll be the straight talker.’
Battle to be Eton’s Head Master begins
He once spoke about his love for his alma mater, Eton College, remarking that he couldn’t help feeling that it ‘counted against’ anyone who hadn’t been educated there.
So admirers of Sir Nicholas Coleridge, one-time glossy magazine supremo, now back at Eton as its Provost, are watching him intently following the announcement that current Head Master, Simon Henderson, is stepping down next year.
I can disclose that Henderson’s impending departure is causing particular concern at St Edward’s, the school the Prince and Princess of Wales discreetly visited in 2024.
The headmaster, Alastair Chirnside, graduated from Oxford in Classics and French, and is an Old Etonian, surely making the post irresistible.
‘He’s the No 1 choice,’ a Teddies’ stalwart wails, ‘but we need him until at least 2033.’
Many thespians are tired of arrogant theatregoers who use their mobile phones during performances, and now The Young Ones star Nigel Planer says some such audience members are bringing an extra whiff of entitlement to his live show.
‘Every now and then a family will take up half a row in a big theatre and sit there eating a takeaway that you can smell from the stage, while filming the performance on their mobile,’ he tells me.
Planer, 73, who played hippie Neil in the hit BBC sitcom, launched his new storytelling tour, Young Once, this month.
He adds: ‘It’s massively distracting for actors working their t*** off on stage – thankfully, the audiences in the smaller venues I’m visiting on my current tour are lovely.’
Why Bowie’s girl Lexi is fuming
David Bowie’s daughter Alexandria ‘Lexi’ Jones had her phone stolen on a night out in Queens, New York
David Bowie found peace in New York, calling the city home from 1999 until his death in 2016.
But for his daughter Alexandria ‘Lexi’ Jones, whose mother is model Iman, the city has proved less kind after her phone was stolen on a night out in Queens.
The musician, 25, vented online: ‘Whoever pickpocketed me in Queens and stole my phone after being at the club for five minutes, you are dead to me.
‘I’m posting from my computer,’ explains Lexi, who despairs: ‘Everything I ever created was on that thing and I backed up nothing like an idiot.’
Katie proves she’s a total professional
Katie Derham at the Royal Albert Hall, in Kensington, west London, where the BBC’s Proms recorded and broadcast
The face of the BBC Proms Katie Derham says: ‘There have been times when we’ve had delays and we’ve had to fill five minutes [of time during live broadcasts]’, but she has a back-up plan for such scenarios.
‘One time there was a massively long applause while we were waiting for another piece.
‘I was in the Radio 3 [private] box, my daughter and one of her friends were there and I ended up interviewing them just to fill the time,’ the BBC Radio 3 presenter tells me.
‘My daughter was like: ‘Mum, seriously?’
Eddie Marsan, who played Amy Winehouse’s father in Back To Black, has long spoken up for fellow working-class actors, once saying: ‘If you come from a disadvantaged background, you have to be exceptional to have a hope of a career [in acting] – if you come from a privileged background, you can be mediocre.’
Now the Stepney, east London-born star, 57, has revealed he’s faced class struggles closer to home.
‘I come from a completely different background to the ones my kids live in. My boys come from west London, they went to quite a posh school,’ the father of four explains on the Parenting Hell podcast. ‘When they play football, the other dads are like: ‘Oh well done, Jasper’, and I’ll be like: ‘Go on, get stuck in son.’
‘One day, my eldest son was in the middle of a football game, he stopped and said to me: ‘Dad, less cockney, less cockney.’
