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Paper Monitor

11:27 UK time, Thursday, 28 December 2006

A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

The drama and details of Tony Blair's Christmas holiday plans make it hard to know what the top line of the story might be. On the one hand, the prime minister had a close shave after the Jumbo carrying him and his family to Florida overshot the runway at Miami airport. On the other, the Blairs are again availing themselves of a celebrity pad – in this case, Bee Gee's singer Robin Gibb's 10-bedroom gaff in Florida.

The Sun ties both strands together with the neat headline "Stayin' Alive", while the Daily Mail spies an empty soapbox, and duly occupies it. "Shameless" runs its front page splash, accusing the Blairs of holidaying for free, at the Gibbs' expense.

And, not for the first time (remember the French villa where they stayed which had once allegedly been the venue for a porn film?), sex and sleaze cloud their choice of destination. The Mail summons the memory of a recent party staged by the Gibbs at the mansion, held in aid of an Aids charity.

Robin "sits alone by the fire, staring into the flames… lost in thought and [showing] little interest in his bisexual Druid priestess wife and her lesbian coterie".

Just to recap: that's bisexual, Druid, priestess and lesbian.

And that's before you get to the "leather wearing", "ample bosom" and "three drag queens". So outraged is the Mail, it fails to even mention Gibb's criminal mullet hairstyle, capped-sleeved T-shirt combo in an archive picture printed by the paper.

But wait, there's more sex still - the Gibbs' home was apparently where John F Kennedy bedded Marilyn Monroe and other paramours.

A final point of mild, and largely irrelevant, interest is that Mrs Gibb used to run a beanbag factory in Plumstead.

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