Britney's homing in on London - and a cute guy

Britney Spears may have caught flak for being a petulant pop

princess after ignoring her fans while in London, but staff at the Berkeley,

the Knightsbridge hotel where she was staying last week in the £3,000-a-night

penthouse suite, won't hear a word against her.

'She was an absolute poppet and gave everyone from the bellboy to the

receptionist front-row tickets to her concert,' says a music industry mole.

'She was staying in the hotel with her mother and they made a lot of use of

the spa.' Indeed, Miss Spears enjoyed London so much she told one of the

girls who helped organise her tour that she would be returning to look for a

house.

'I can totally relax here and not be hassled,' she gushed. 'I love the pubs and the British guys are kinda cute too.'

His time in the Army, not to mention his two years in jail, have paid off for

Lord Brocket, who has landed a role as presenter of a forthcoming reality

television series, Bad Lads' Army.

The series is ITV's new version of Lads' Army, the show in which young men

were put through four weeks of Fifties-style National Service training to

toughen them up.

'But this time the 30 guys really will be bad boys from innercity areas,'

says Charles Brocket. 'They will be put in an Army camp on Salisbury Plain

staffed by former sergeant-majors and shouted at and generally abused – the

sort of thing they would normally do to other people.' The aristocratic

smoothie is sure this will knock the cockiness out of the lads. 'When I was

in the Army I was knocked about quite a bit and I came out much the better

for it,' he assures me.

It had all the promise of being a sentimental reunion with the greatest

blonde rock chick of the Seventies – until Debbie Harry failed to turn up to

her own book launch in West London last week.

Not that the publishers of the book, entitled Picture This, seemed concerned

by the Blondie star's absence.

'She couldn't make it in the end,' said a spokesman airily, 'but we've got

pictures of her instead.' The Chelsea-based singer was, in fact, in the

States, but she will be back in time for her date at Oxfordshire grandee Lord

Rotherwick's Cornbury Park music festival on July 10, when she has been

booked to perform with Will Young and Jools Holland.

A report that Camilla Parker Bowles is battling lung cancer was, rightly,

dismissed as 'rubbish' yesterday by a senior aide. The rumour apparently

started because Mrs PB has hardly been seen in public in the past three

months, not least because she and Prince Charles have spent so much time at

their Scottish love-nest, Birkhall.

But last week Camilla ventured to

Aberdeen for a night out. What was the glittering occasion? It was a fashion

show and auction for the Brook Hospital for Animals, which raised £25,000

towards rescuing sick donkeys.

'It was a real surprise we got her,' beams the

charity's fundraiser John Tram Pleasure. 'Thanks to her presence we made the

most ever from a single event.'

Sunny news for ITV weathergirl Sian Lloyd who, I am happy to

announce, is to marry Lembit Opik, the Lib Dem MP who has been tipped as a

successor to the jaded party leader Charles Kennedy.

Yesterday Miss Lloyd, 44, was calling her friends to tell them of her

engagement to the 39-year-old MP for Montgomeryshire, whose name sounds like

an anagram but stems from his Estonian parentage.

The pair first met three years ago and Lembit, who is the Liberals' Wales

spokesman, wooed her with endless games of chess and discussions about his

pet subject - asteroids. She has called him 'the most fascinating man I've

ever met' and has revealed they love nothing better than sharing late-night

baths.

The Welsh weathergirl's previous love was Mark Cavendish, a kinsman of the

Duke of Devonshire. They met at Cardiff University and spent the next 14

years together before breaking up in 1995 after a huge row at the cottage

they shared in Wiltshire.

I know GMTV presenter Kate Garraway is keen to keep fit,

especially as she has a new boyfriend to please, but is the 35-year-old

divorcee trying too hard?

Having run in the London Marathon, Kate hopped straight on to a flight to

Los Angeles for a holiday.

But disaster struck when the plane arrived in the States - Kate found she

couldn't stand up; her muscles had gone into spasm and she had to be helped

off the plane by two Americans.

'Kate had slept through the whole flight

because she was completely exhausted by the race,' reports a fellow passenger

who also works in TV.

'When the plane touched down her muscles had seized up and she had to ask

two guys to lift her out of her seat.

'They were relieved when she told them it was because of the marathon - one

of them apparently thought she had MS.'