John Gibson: Beatle Bob a swinger to the end

Published on 20/06/2012 12:54

Colourful, to say the least. But he’d have settled gratefully for “entrepreneurial”. Bob Thomson has died at 72 in Malaga, where he and wife Corrinne settled four years ago.

Bob, nicknamed “Flash” for his swagger at Broughton Secondary in Edinburgh where he schooled, was lifelong involved in countless “projects”.

Fancied himself as a singer and once asked me to listen to a recording he had just made, playing it to me in one of a string of swank cars. “Now tell me,” he asked. “Can you honestly tell the difference between me and Sinatra?” He could be almost lovable with it.

Says Corrinne, married to Bob 20 years: “He died of a heart attack while driving. He’d been singing in a club the night before. He loved an audience.”

Great, it’s Kate

Here’s how to have your picture fill a quarter of the Telegraph’s front page (and three more inside), as transpired last Thursday. Wear a dinky, impudent little hat, a thigh-length coat and flash a pearly smile.

Oh, and be the Duchess of Cambridge.

Listen, Kate. Don’t get your knickers in a twist. We still love you madly. We’re never going to ignore you. Just don’t keep trying so hard.

Afterwords . .

. . . “For an old bloke with two metal hips and a piece of shrapnel in me, I’m doing all right”. Martin Bell, 73, formerly the man in the white suit, wounded in Bosnia by mortar fire.