People who moan about celebrity culture — how it undermines our intelligence, distracts us from things that matter, deadens our desire to change the world; how it lifts up pretty, empty vessels, on whom it bestows epic, undeserved, unedifying privilege — really do not know what they’re talking about. Celebs are worth every penny of the millions they wrench from us with their hastily branded wellness empires, and their rosé wines, every second of the attention we give them. The service they perform is invaluable. It is that of getting together with each other in the most random, unpredictable and unlikely of configurations, thereby providing titillation, hilarity and also sex, in the midst of a world otherwise too bleak, unfunny and sexless, to contemplate.
So: thank you, Elizabeth Hurley and Billy Rae Cyrus! Thank you, Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson! And now? As of yesterday, when news broke and paparazzi images were first published? Thank you, Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry!
• Katy Perry at Glasgow Ovo Hydro review — breathtakingly bonkers
This weekend, the former Canadian PM (53), and the 40-year-old pop star and astropassenger (Perry popped into space in April, you’ll recall, c/o Jeff Bezos), went “yacht official”. They were papped together on The Caravelle, Perry’s 24-metre boat, while bobbing about off the coast of Santa Barbara. The resulting images are as blurry as they are definitive, evidence of what can only accurately be described as “on-deck canoodling” — the money shot being Trudeau’s placement of his right hand, on Perry’s bottom. Hoorah! Months of speculation (or what would have been, had we not somehow forgotten all about it, I blame Anderson and Neeson) ended! A new, deliciously unlikely — and therefore extra-compelling — celebrity combination is confirmed, giving us some respite from all the war, death, destruction, abhorrent acts of racism and so forth.
The couple were first spotted together in Montreal in July, wandering through the Mount Royal Park, before eating dinner at Le Violon in Montreal. According to Samantha Jin, the head of communications for Le Violon, at that point there had been: “No visual signs of PDA or anything,” so: definitely no hands placed opportunistically and proprietorially on any bottoms. Days later, Trudeau and his 16-year-old daughter Ella-Grace were spotted in the crowd at a Perry gig in Montreal.
The former Canadian prime minister and pop star were first spotted together in July
SWNS
What brought Trudeau and Perry together — logistically and spiritually — is unclear. We can but speculate wildly (with minds much more usefully applied than to the implacable advance of Reform/global warming) re: where exactly their eyes first met, whether the attraction was immediate, who said what first to whom and who then made the first move? That their independent celebrity traverses milieux — the pop and the political — adds to their appeal, making the liaison seem more authentic in its lack of predictability. Or maybe we like it because it gives us hope that something hilarious and unlikely might yet knock us off our feet, too.
Trudeau and Perry’s back stories add yet more fuel to the fire of public fascination. Perry’s romantic trajectory took in a marriage to, then sudden, unexplained divorce from, the now disgraced comedian Russell Brand. Also a nine-year relationship with the actor Orlando Bloom, which produced one daughter (Daisy Dove, five), and one most revealing shot of the couple holidaying on a paddle board: Bloom was naked and… let’s just say, congratulations were in order, and heartfelt.
Trudeau, meanwhile, married Sophie Grégoire (once described by Meghan Markle as “a dear friend”, although Grégoire said she hasn’t actually “spent much time” with the Duchess) in 2005, the couple had three children, then, despite their seeming like a golden political pairing, split in 2023 following some “difficult and meaningful conversations”. Trudeau has a reputation for a level of hotness that is borderline obscene for a politician: ref that time he accidentally photobombed someone else’s wedding while wearing a wetsuit he’d rolled down to display acres of honed chest. We were never not going to be intrigued by who he hooked up with next — purely for the aesthetics. Ah but, his reputation is simultaneously one of a borderline unbearable degree of wokeness. Margaret Atwood once accused him of “Orwellian” levels of intervention.
Perry on the other hand, tends towards a goofy, sexy kind of prettiness, and a reputation of political complexity. She was raised in a religious household by Pentecostal pastor parents, caused churchy uproar in 2008 with her debut single I Kissed A Girl (And I Liked It), endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024, but has lately been assumed to be drifting toward the Republican camp on account of her friendship with Lauren Sanchez and Bezos.
Presumably the couple can use any and all political friction as foreplay, like we used to in the nineties… Oooh, unless Trudeau is entering his post-woke era? Dating a pop star is a rather decadent thing to do, isn’t it, plus: that hand on Perry’s bum? That is not a woke hand.
But long-ish may it last! It’s such fantastically good, semi-clean fun. Potent and jolly and sexy and inconsequential. As the world lurches towards who knows what manner of fresh hell, I am not sure we have ever needed such yachty gropey levity more.