The Attention-Whore Index

The Index has been off for a few weeks, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t reach back and report our winners from a month ago: Donald Trump (47.3 percent), George Santos (23.6 percent), and Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift (18.6 percent). That doesn’t exactly feel like ancient history, does it? And during the subsequent interregnum, those four—and many other professional attention hogs—have stayed in fighting trim, even if they understood that AIR MAIL wasn’t monitoring their every spotlight-grabbing move.

Because it’s not as if Trump and Santos have gone away. Nor have all those people who for some reason still want to be president, a field now augmented by one (Jill Stein), with maybe more to come (Joe Manchin). The British royals have again been popping up everywhere, Oscar Pistorius intruded on our consciousness for the first time in years, and—stop the presses—Daryl Hall sued John Oates.

But with wars going on in Europe and the Middle East, it takes a special kind of A.W. to claim center stage. Which brings us to:

The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …

1.

ELON MUSK

Hauled himself over to Israel after a busy week during which he endorsed an anti-Semitic post, suffered the deserved backlash and fallout (significant loss of advertising on X), and then sued the watchdog group that had called him on it—because it was of course all their fault. (His olive branch to advertisers who abandoned X: “Go f*** yourself. Go. F***. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”) Meanwhile, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, quit X, describing it as a “gigantic worldwide sewer.”

2.

THE BRITISH ROYALS

They’re getting noisy again. Charles—through no fault of his own, it should be said—turned 75. Harry did not attend the birthday celebration. (Ah, but who snubbed whom?) Harry and Meghan do, or possibly don’t, desire “a Sandringham Christmas,” say the tabloids. (How would they get there? Well, the small-carbon-footprint enthusiasts took a private jet to Las Vegas for a Katy Perry concert.) Meanwhile, in Singapore, William said he wanted to “go a step further” than his family in the changing-the-world department. And so on. But the real shocker was provided by our next Attention-Whore nominee …

3.

OMID SCOBIE

The Sussex-friendly (but not, repeat not, Sussex friend) author and journalist claimed in his Firm-bashing new book that King Charles has his shoelaces ironed. With that revelation still reverberating through the culture, Scobie spent the latter part of the week insisting that he knew nothing about how the names of two royals accused of speculating on the embryonic Prince Archie’s skin color—allegedly King Charles and the Princess of Wales—made it into the Dutch edition of his book. Probably just a typesetter’s error.

4.

NIKKI HALEY

Building on a windfall of big donors, an improvement in her polling, and (especially) having called Vivek Ramaswamy “just scum” on national TV, she’s hurtling with newfound momentum toward what still looks like a distant second-place finish in Iowa.

5.

DONALD TRUMP

The person Haley trails claimed to have “won all 50 states” last election, continued to “sarcastically” refer to Obama as the current president, and talked about wanting to use the military freely within the United States. And let’s not forget: he finally dropped the façade that he doesn’t really employ Nazi rhetoric.

6.

RISHI SUNAK

Points for thin-skinned petulance: his last-minute cancellation of a meeting with Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, after Mitsotakis had the temerity to tell a TV interviewer he thought the Elgin Marbles belonged in Greece. The British government offered him 45 minutes with a deputy instead. Mitsotakis declined, Sunak accused him of “grandstand[ing],” and the ancient friezes remained in the British Museum.

7.

GEORGE SANTOS

Got low marks from the House Ethics Committee, announced he wouldn’t seek re-election, and then fell into an aggrieved protective crouch, saying, “Within the ranks of the United States Congress, there’s felons galore, there’s people with all sorts of sheisty background … [who don’t] show up to vote because they’re too hungover or whatever the reason is, or not show up to vote at all and just give their card out like fucking candy for someone else to vote for them. This shit happens every single week. Where are the ethics investigations? … These people need to understand it’s done when I say it’s done, when I want it to be done, not when they want it to be done.” Well, on Friday, they wanted it to be done.

And now for this week’s Diary …

Fine, you’re Australia’s richest person, a Trump-loving, climate-change-denying multi-billionaire who has crusaded for more, and better, mooring opportunities for super-yachts. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re also capable of defrauding two of your (billionaire) children. However that’s what John Hancock, 48, and Bianca Rinehart, 47, are claiming their iron-ore magnate mother, Gina Rinehart, has done, casting her in Western Australia’s Supreme Court as “a fraudster who stole billions of dollars in mining assets that they say their grandfather had meant to leave to them,” reported The Times of London. The children are also in separate arbitration with their mother over her $22 billion fortune, “which they have been squabbling over for most of their adult lives.” Fun times!

A group of 1,400-year-old Buddhist statues discovered two years ago along this 3,000-year-old transportation route in Nanjiang county have been painted over in “gaudy” colors by villagers wanting to “thank the gods for helping them fulfill their dreams,” according to the South China Morning Post. “Applying colour to old and worn-out Buddhist figures frequently occurs in China, with the work usually funded by villagers.” Officials are exploring ways of restoring the statues … and of “educating” the villagers.

The recent forced resignation of Spain’s high-profile equality minister, Irene Montero, may have been “the political price she had to pay after the approval of the new rape law, popularly known as ‘only yes is yes,’” Euronews reported. The law, which Montero advocated for and which was enacted last year, defined all non-consensual sex as rape, but had an unfortunate side effect: by also reducing minimum and maximum sentences, sex offenders convicted under the previous legislation were able to appeal—resulting in more than 1,000 of them being released. As one observer noted, “Problematic.”

Business is off, “mentalities have changed,” and, besides, the owner, Jacques Leban, is nearly 80 and has been plying his trade for more than half a century. For those and other reasons, Leban, the last horsemeat butcher in Paris, will close his shop—at some unspecified point in time—saying he’s tired of being called a “murderer.” Meanwhile, “[h]e hangs on,” a fellow merchant along Rue Cambronne told Le Parisien. “His horse butchery is his life.”

London’s High Court will hear a dispute that could have a profound effect on mobile dog-grooming options in the vicinity of Redditch, Solihull, and South Birmingham. Laura Thurgood is suing her former business partner, Danielle Laight, for the equivalent of $63,000 over the use of the name “Wash Wiggle & Wag,” the service they started five years ago. Thurgood also alleges a “vicious” online smear campaign by Laight, who rejects the charges and claims that, anyway, Thurgood has continued her business mostly under other names, specifically Doggy Style and Scruffy2Fluffy. Stay tuned—or perhaps don’t. —George Kalogerakis

George Kalogerakis, one of the original editor-writers at Spy, later worked for Vanity Fair, New York, and The New York Times, where he was deputy op-ed editor. A co-author of Spy: The Funny Years and co-editor of Disunion: A History of the Civil War, he is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL