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ROYAL MANX AGRICULTURAL SHOW

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Disclaimer: Sensitive Content

This article contains mentions of childhood abuse and early sexual experiences. Some readers may find these details upsetting or distressing. The content is based on claims made in a published biography. It is shared here for informational purposes only.

A new book on Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, has made several serious claims about his private life. Written by Andrew Lownie, the biography claims that Andrew had his first sexual experience when he was just 8 years old.

He became sexually active at the age of 11 and had sexual experiences with “more than half-a-dozen girls” in the following two years.

The biography, The Rise and Fall of the House of York, is 456 pages long. The book has been marketed as the “most devastating royal biography ever written”. It also explores Andrew’s adult relationships and his controversial links to Jeffrey Epstein.

It suggests that such early life experiences may have shaped his adult behaviour as he realised that he was “obsessed with women”. One source quoted in the book said these early experiences could be linked to later struggles with risky decisions and mental health.

It “might be the root of Andrew’s problems”, says the source. The early exposure explains “why he’s spent most of his adult life at high risk of self-abuse, depression, and risky sexual encounters”, The Telegraph quotes an insider as saying in the book.

Another insider confirmed to the publication that the prince’s adult encounters were “at what most of us would consider as too young an age”. “Poor chap,” the source said.

The author describes it as a story of childhood struggles, affairs, betrayal, greed, arrogance, and establishment cover-ups. According to people close to Prince Andrew, the book also discusses how little the public really knows about his personal life.

While Prince Andrew is still legally a prince, he has lost almost all royal duties, military roles, and the public use of “His Royal Highness”. He is no longer a working royal, nor does he represent the monarchy now in any official capacity.

Effects of child abuse

Adult encounters with anyone below the legal age of consent are always considered abuse, not consensual activities. Even if the person said “yes”, it is still legally and clinically defined as abuse.

Multiple studies have found clear connections between childhood abuse and hypersexuality. Survivors of such abuse may engage in risky sexual behaviour.

A 2020 study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine involved 16,823 adults. Men who suffered abuse in their childhood are more likely to experience hypersexuality, according to the study.

If you or someone you know has faced any kind of abuse, please seek help. Call 1098 for immediate rescue, support and counselling.

Jonathan Scott has shared a shocking update about his and Zooey Deschanel’s wedding plans.

Speaking to People magazine on Thursday, the 47-year-old TV personality revealed that he and Zooey haven’t started planning for their wedding yet.

“We’ve just been having so much fun traveling with the kids and filming this show and stuff,” said Jonathan, who got engaged with the New Girl actress in August 2023 after four years of dating.

“So no, we have not actually made any plans yet, which, it’s been two years now since I proposed,” added the Property Brothers star.

Jonathan further told the outlet that he considers himself stepdad to Zooey’s two kids, whom she welcomed with ex-husband Jacob Pechenik.

The Brother vs. Brother star added that he and the Yes Man actress are still in agreement with how they want their wedding to be when the time comes. 

“Whatever we do, it has to be meaningful to us and we want to gather our friends and family and have a good time,” said Jonathan. “We want to keep it very, very intimate.”

Previously, in an interview with E! News, Jonathan revealed that he is not in a rush to walk down the aisle with Zooey.

“The good thing is when you find somebody, at this stage in our lives, we don’t have the energy or time for the BS anymore,” the TV star told the publication in December 2023. 

“And so, we’re not taking any pressure from anybody. Nobody’s gonna tell us what our guest list is gonna look like. We’re just gonna do things the way we want to do things because it’s about each other,” he added.

Meghan Markle made an important decision about As Ever after a major realisation about her star power in Prince Harry’s home country, the UK.

For the unversed, the Duchess of Sussex marked a powerful return in 2025 with back-to-back announcements about her new career ventures.

Among those, one was her lifestyle brand As Ever. From kitchen products to newly launched wine, the pantry was sold out within hours.

At the moment, Meghan is shipping her products to 50 US States.

The real reason behind her decision not to sell As Ever in the UK has now been revealed by a PR expert. 

In conversation with Express.co.uk, Nick Ede said, “I don’t think the UK is a focus for the As Ever brand as it’s driven by popularity and at the moment Meghan doesn’t have the star power in the UK that she once had.”

He added, “The idea of buying flower sprinkles is a bit alien to UK consumers.”

“There is such a huge choice of rose wines in the UK from Kylie Minogue to Lady A that another brand just won’t drive the volume or demand that they will need to make it a success,” Nick stated. 

Instead of a show, Stine Goya collaborated with creative studio File Under Pop and Michelin-star chef Morten Falk on Tuesday night. Guests, who included members of the Stine Goya team, had hand-painted plates and personalised painted coasters. Painted drapes lined the archways, with bowls of cherries and mountains of whipped butter on display. The food was equally aesthetic, with stuffed courgette flowers and plates of candied fruit.

On Tuesday, Scandi homeware label Tekla hosted a breakfast, with platters of plums and Danish pastries and plates of cheese on a bun in perfect straight lines. On Wednesday, New Balance hosted a pop-up in Nytorv square, in collaboration with local café Atelier September, with rye bread and tomatoes served (again) with whipped butter. The Garment has a pink-themed dinner, with a display made up of cotton candy and pink peas.

Trends to note

Perhaps it’s because Scandi designers took their holidays in June and July, while prepping their shows, but a lot of the collections this season felt resort inspired. Flip flops continue to dominate the runway, continuing from the men’s SS26 season. There was a Havaianas collaboration at Opéra Sport, beaded styles at Cmmn Swdn and raffia versions at Alis. When it came to the clothes, there was plenty of relaxed fringing at MKDT Studio, raffia at Cmmn Swdn and Iamisigo, and sheer summer dresses at Rave Review. For many smaller Copenhagen brands, they perhaps don’t do a resort collection, so it makes sense to provide looks across the summer season.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Copenhagen without plenty of minimalist tailoring, and Hsu notes that colour palettes felt particularly toned down this season.

But designers like Bonnetje, MKDT Studio, Stel, Mark Quad and PLN played with styling and silhouette for SS26, to create unique looks that stand out. Agathe Cloé Vaissiere, womenswear buyer at Printemps, says that consumers today are looking for interesting twists on classic silhouettes, as more and more move away from quiet luxury. “I saw a lot of deconstructed tailoring, fringing and panels,” adds Marine Humeau, buying manager at Printemps.

“I’ve seen a nice balance of relevancy and inspirational fashion this week,” says Nordstrom’s associate fashion director Linda Cui Zhang. “It’s wonderful to discover brands that customers can easily integrate into their wardrobes (Birrot), as well as brands focused on high-craft and luxury materials (Ranra, Freya Dalsjø).”

Shawn Mendes just relocated to a small village in the Cotswolds.

The 26-year-old pop star is loving life in the tiny village of Great Tew in south-west of England, with a source reporting to The Sun, “We’re awash with stars and now Shawn has started hanging out in Great Tew all the time.”

They continued, “The word on the street is that he’s rented a little place here for some peace and quiet before he goes off on his tour.”

“No one ever asks him for a selfie so he must be loving the fact he’s left alone. But when he walks into cafes and pubs in the area, heads do turn,” the insider concluded.

Shawn, who has famously dated pop star Camila Cabello, has become the “talk of the village” but “doesn’t get any special treatment” from the locals.

“Shawn is treated like a normal person too, he doesn’t get any special treatment because he’s famous,” the insider mentioned.

Sharing an incident, they told the outlet, “The last time he was in the cafe, he got a telling-off because he was ordering his food right before the kitchen closed. They told him to hurry up and order.”

“The poor lad. He’s the talk of the village,” the source quipped.

Shawn Mendes himself has also been vocal about the struggles he has faced due to stardom and the pressures that come with it.

He told NME previously: “Yeah, it really depends on the day. Because I’ve gone through swings where I’ve just deleted social media and pretended that no one can see me, and that wasn’t right. And then I’ve gone through places where all I can think about is what people think [and] how they see me, and that wasn’t right [either]. So yeah, it’s a constant relationship, like anything.”

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Ari Aster’s new movie, Eddington, pits Joaquin Phoenix against Pedro Pascal as men with conflicting takes on how to get their small town through the crisis of Covid. It’s also a film about the contemporary political crisis in the US and the influence of technology on our lives.

Adam Curtis’s latest documentary series, Shifty, covers similar themes but through the lens of British life in the Thatcher years of the late 1970s to early 1990s. This era, he argues, put in place a substantial shift in power away from the individual and the nation state, changes that are still playing out today.

Earlier this summer, the two men met in London to discuss the thinking behind their work, the questions that animate them and the corroding power of nostalgia.

Ari Aster: My family lives in New Mexico and I grew up there; it’s where I spent my adolescence. In 2020 a Covid scare brought me back home and I was in a situation where a lot of the people closest to me were in totally different algorithms. We couldn’t reach each other.

In early June, when the fever reached its highest pitch, I started writing down what I perceived to be in the air. I didn’t know whether things were about to explode and boil over, or if we would ever come out of lockdown, but I could tell that something was happening. I’ve also always wanted to make a film about New Mexico. And so it kind of became a western.

Adam Curtis: A thing I really like about the film is the sense that, up to that point, there was somehow a daddy in the room. Then, when Covid happens, Daddy leaves and all these groups are on their own. All the last vestiges of power, or big power, just disappeared. They can no longer see what they have in common.

AA: They’re all connected in that they all care about the world, and they all know that something is wrong. But that’s where the connection ends. I wanted them all to be distinguished by a yearning for the America they believe in, but they’re not living on the same plane.

AC: That’s the point where you start from: Daddy’s gone, they’re all on their own, they all have a dream of America, but they’re like billiard balls: they keep on hitting each other. And each time they hit each other they amplify each other’s version of reality and it just gets crazy.

AA: Yeah, they’re all paranoid. And as those billiard balls start knocking into each other, I wanted the film itself to also become gripped by that paranoia. I was trying to take a capacious, objective stance in the beginning, and then that objectivity kind of falls away. I don’t know if the film is apolitical or if it’s omnipolitical, but all those fantasies of what is happening start to take over the film. That’s the idea.

AC: If you have a world in which everyone is encouraged to be a total individualist, they tend to get trapped in that mindset. It’s wonderful when things are going well, because you, your own desires and thoughts are the centre of the world. But the moment things go wrong, you retreat into yourself. And the only thing you can trust is your own ideas. You come to believe in them intensely, because that’s the only thing that makes you feel safe. And I think that’s where we are now.

In Shifty, I was tracing the roots of that in Britain and I was trying to do it sympathetically. And Ari, I don’t think that in Eddington you apply the normal righteous disapproval of so many films today, either. You actually take the characters on their own terms. You might not sympathise, but you get an understanding of why people have retreated into their own world and will not accept any other reality. I think you’re dealing with what comes next.

AA: They’re all unmoored, but they’re clinging to some buoy. Shifty really excited me because it felt like a mirror from the past. It was shocking to see how all these things that feel unprecedented right now are actually the current reverberation of something that started a long time ago. It’s just that the technology has changed, and because these things have been getting amplified for so long, the distortions have become more intense.

AC: The most difficult thing to do, especially in our time, is make the recent past unfamiliar. It’s almost impossible. And that’s the task I set myself. It’s a bit like the Mona Lisa. If you point it out to someone, they don’t see it. They go: “Oh yeah, that’s the Mona Lisa.” They don’t look at it at all.

What you want to do is find a way of breaking that. It’s how you edit the stuff a lot of you have lived through together, to make you look at it fresh. If you just live in a world of continuous fragmentation, the past never has a moment to settle down. In previous eras, you would have all those fragments of experience, but over 20 or 30 years, which is the length of time I was dealing with, most of those fragments would just disappear, leaving a few to settle down, out of which would come an agreed narrative about history.

Instead, today we live in a world where those fragments are continually played back to us, as you show in the movie. I think that’s why people find it very difficult to understand how trapped they’ve become in their own world, because they have no story that explains how they got there. What you get is a continuous political narrative which says: politicians rise up, they prove to be shit, and they fall. That’s all we’re told these days.

AA: Eddington is a movie about the environment. It’s not a movie that says: “This is the way to think, this is the way to feel, this is what’s happening.” Because what has happened is that we have become totally atomised and cannot reach each other. And as long as that persists – which a lot of people have a lot invested in – nothing can change. Hopefully by being a little bit more egalitarian in the way I’m assessing the landscape with as much objectivity as I can muster, I can reach some people that have been totally alienated by my side of the culture.

AC: A good political film makes people reflect on themselves. The problem is that over the past 30 or 40 years, the movies that call themselves political have actually been the very opposite. They groom their audiences by saying to them: “You are right to think and believe the way you do.” In that way, they encourage people to wallow in their self-righteousness and so block any self-reflection. Which means that so many “radical movies” are actually reactionary.

There is no way forward unless people actually reflect on the limitations of their own self-righteousness and the possible dangers it has for society. That includes well-meaning liberals as much as it includes extreme rightwingers or tech-bro conspiracy theorists: it stops them realising that everyone might be part of a new system of power which works through increasing fragmentation and increasingly shrill self-righteousness. And I think it should be a badge of pride if you, Ari Aster, get that self-righteousness to squawk at you with Eddington. It’ll prove that you’ve done it right.

AA: There’s a feedback loop of nostalgia. Not just nostalgia and trauma. We’re always looking back into the past to see why we are here right now. “Oh, it’s because this happened to me.” As opposed to – and this is what you’ve been talking about for ever – where is the new idea? Where is our vision of the future? Because nobody believes in the future any more. I don’t believe in the future, and I’m desperately looking for it.

AC: You’re right about trauma. Increasingly over the last four or five years, people have retreated into themselves and are blaming their own past. They’re not only playing back the music or films of the past, they’re playing back their own past and finding in those fragments of their memory the reasons why they are feeling bad, anxious, uncertain, afraid and lonely – and it’s given the term trauma. Trauma is a very specific, real and frightening for those who experience it. But recently it’s been widened to such an extent that you are blaming yourself all the time through your own reworking of the past. Rather like AI goes back and reworks the past and plays it back to you. Now you’re doing that to yourself.

AA: All the characters in Eddington are living in different movies. The film is a western, right? But Joe [Joaquin Phoenix’s character, the sheriff of Eddington] would have seen all the westerns. That’s a huge part of his identity and what informs everything he does, including having become a sheriff in the first place. The way he walks is informed by the way John Wayne walks. He’s a 50-year-old man, so the action movies of the 80s and 90s would have been important to him. And then at the end of the movie, he gets to live in his own action movie. He’s shooting at phantoms. But that applies to every character in this film. The one thing that is definitely happening in Eddington is that a hyperscale datacentre is being built. And really, all of the stories in Eddington are just data, from one perspective.

AC: Don’t give it away!

AA: OK, sorry. Yes, I won’t give it away. But you’re right. There are other things outside they don’t see.

AC: The most important thing that political film-making should do now is make us aware that there’s something else beyond – including beyond the internet. Everything now in movies really comes through the internet. But we know, logically, that the internet is not everything. There is something else there, but no one’s telling us about it.

What I really like about Eddington is at the end you say there is something else outside. Something beyond the thin crust of hysteria and fear that keeps all of us trapped in bubbles today.

People only search for conspiracy theories these days because no one else is giving them any stories. You know: those in power just want to manage you. And, quite frankly, managers never tell stories. They keep you there by repeating and repeating. So that’s why people don’t trust them and the most important thing to do is to acknowledge that.

That’s why I call my series Shifty. That actually, nothing is certain and the only way you can deal with that as a journalist is by acknowledging it and trying to explain why the world feels like that today.

The organisation I work for – the BBC – has created BBC Verify to try to reassert certainty. It is important because rationality is still the only thing we have to manage the complexity of the world. But on its own terms it’s not enough, because the universe is not exclusively rational. It’s also full of all kinds of strange swirling waves of feeling and ghosts and myths that are often completely unreal.

A confident system of power takes all those mad psychodramas and creates a dominant story out of them. But when that goes – as has happened today – they run out of control sweeping through societies, creating uncertainty and suspicion.

What journalism and films should be trying to do today is to explain how that has happened – to acknowledge that uncertainty is the realism of our time because that is how people experience the world today. If you don’t do that, the people in their bubbles will be very suspicious of you. Because they know that we the journalists and the politicians and all the experts suffer from that same uncertainty. And we know that they know that. And that becomes toxic.

AA: Certainty has gone for ever now. With the advent of deepfake and AI-generated imagery, belief in what we’re seeing and hearing is now forever gone.

AC: Which means that the most radical thing to do is to say the only way we’re going to move forward is by bypassing all those things, movies, most popular culture, as evidence of the future. It’s a lovely nostalgic world you can go and play in. But actually, real politics, real moving forward, it’s going to come somewhere else, where the complexity of reality might be repossessed in a really fundamental way. I’ve got no idea what it is, but it ain’t going to come through movies or me making pretentious television programmes. It’s just not.

Comedian and actor Kapil Sharma’s Kap’s Cafe in Surrey, Canada, was targeted in a second firing incident within a month on Thursday, August 7, 2025, raising concerns among locals and fans alike. 
| Photo Credit: AP