Paper Monitor
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
We like a joke here at Paper Monitor. Always up for a laugh.
A year ago, a certain well-known comedian appeared in a TV sketch sending up Barclays, which had been criticised for carrying out a tax avoidance scheme. The joker donned a blond wig and hammed it up as a bank clerk, dishing out advice about how best to manipulate the system and pay only 1% tax. Ho ho ho.
But I bet said funny man ain't finding things too funny/is laughing on the other side of his rotund face this morning, after a big investigation in the Times. The paper accuses him of... paying only 1% tax in a scheme that - to this layperson - sounds not dissimilar to the one the funny man derided so deftly.
A big photo of him is splashed across the front page - in it, he holds a finger to his lips in a "shoosh" gesture, looking far less glam than in his Barclays-bashing blond wig get-up.
Never less than picture perfect, though, is a certain Duchess of Cambridge, whose shapely legs and toothy charms grace many a paper's page.
She, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Duchess of Wessex are pictured having a ruddy good time at yesterday's Garter Day service, all adorned in summer pastels and sporting nude-coloured shoes, gifting headline writers with easy puns about being (Daily Mirror) and having (the Sun), and a (front page of the Daily Express), which runs with the rhyming on to page three with "Royals have a scream in cream".
Fragrant Kate's outfit ticked the thrifty box too - she'd worn it at last year's Trooping the Colour. The fashion choices of the artist-formerly-known-as-the-nation's-sweetheart (Cheryl Cole) don't go down quite as well, at least not in the Mail.
A picture gallery of her most unusual sartorial choices during a "retina-burning year" of "car-crash couture" features MC Hammer trousers, multi-coloured leopard-print jeggings and Power Ranger chic.
Shudder.
But, let's face it, she'd look good in a bin bag - or even a Barclays uniform and blonde wig.