Olympics minister falls victim to cyber-hacker

* Now that Tessa Jowell has packed up her boxes and left the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to concentrate on the Olympics, you might think the level of security, when it comes to working her new patch, would be critical. So it's alarming, then, to report on a worrying breach that seemed to arise yesterday morning.

Late on Monday night, prominent journalists received an email purporting to be from Jowell asking them to get in touch.

One such message, seen by Pandora, read: "Can we speak privately? I want to go public with my private tale of Tony. Tessa Jowell."

The following day, however, another message was sent from the same address which claimed Jowell had been the unfortunate victim of an internet cyber-hacker, who'd used her account to send out phoney emails.

"My email account was hacked last night," said the note. "Have now sorted the problem out. Sorry about the Tony email. TJ."

Presumably, if Jowell's email has been hijacked at some stage, it raises serious security issues over any government business that has been discussed using the account. IT experts reckon the only way someone could have gained access to it would have been by guessing her password.

Unfortunately, despite repeated efforts yesterday afternoon, no one from Jowell's office would call backto comment on the matter, so there was no way of establishing whether or not it was a hoax.

* Gordon Brown and David Cameron have both shamelessly courted celebrity endorsements in the past, but they'd be best advised to not to bother with porcelain-faced burlesque performer Dita Von Teese.

I caught up with Von Teese during a promotional visit to London last week, and I asked her whether Brown or Cameron would get her vote.

"I'm sorry but I really don't know who either of them are," she replied sniffily.

It was a surprising response, not least because Brown had become Prime Minister just hours before. "I don't like to talk about politics," she added. "I'm just over here to do press."

Perhaps her reticence had something to do with her ex-husband, Marilyn Manson, the spooky shock rocker who has been the scourge of American politicians for years.

* After a five-year push, cameras are finally rolling on the big screen adaptation of Toby Young's calamity-drenched memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.

Despite the film's stellar cast -Jeff Bridges is playing bouffant-haired Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter - an on-set mole rings Pandora to complain about the film's director, Robert Weide.

"He's quite erratic - he's fired his two female assistants and booted out one of the scriptwriters for 'not being Hollywood enough', whatever that means," I'm told. "He also turned down [Jonathan Aitken's daughter] Victoria Aitken for a part, saying her face wasn't right, but then gave it to her identical twin, Alexandra. It's a bit odd."

Young claims not to have heard about the incidents.

* Our new Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has been lauded by all sides for her recent performance in wake of the recent terror alerts.

On Monday, even hard-nosed David Davis was hailing her "calmness and dignity" with which she's handled her ministerial baptism of fire (praise indeed). Locals near her home in Peckham aren't quite so taken though with the calmness being shown by her new security detail, which now accompany Smith everywhere.

"There are great swarms of rozzers from The Royal and Diplomatic protection squad everytime she pulls up outside the door," moans one. "It's a bloody nuisance." It could be that they won't have to put up with it for much longer. Local rumour has it that Smith is about to put the house on the market.

* The waspish banter between Boris Becker and John McEnroe at Wimbledon this year barely lets up.

Delightfully, addressing an audience at London's Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Monday evening, Becker was happy to keep the insults flowing.

"When we're commentating, I never agree with McEnroe on anything at all," he said. "There's a lot of rivalry, obviously - because we've clashed tennis rackets, but then as personalities we clash anyway."

Becker, though, was happy to credit his sparring partner in one area. When the pair first played each other, McEnroe's petulant on-court behaviour apparently gave a 17-year-old Becker a crash course in some of the fruitier words in the English language.

pandora@independent.co.uk

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