Morning:
11°c
An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
London faces a wave of bus and Tube strikes that could cause chaos for millions of passengers as unions walkout over pay and conditions
More...
Having a (masked) ball!
Last updated at 23:39pm on 25.10.06
Lizzie Jagger made a striking entrance
The masked ball was a byword for debauchery and excess in the days when Strawberry Hill House was owned by the waspish playwright Horace Walpole.
Almost 300 years later, it seems that nothing much has changed, as the Gothic mansion played host to an astonishingly louche party in the early hours of yesterday.
• See all the masked stars here. Can you guess who is who? (See answers below)
There was little warning of what was to come as household names like Scarlett Johansson, Jerry Hall and Elizabeth Jagger arrived immaculately dressed at the 18th-Century pile in Twickenham.
David Blunkett's former lover Kimberly Quinn and her husband Stephen were also among the guests.
Even Kate Moss posed politely for photographers, and her notoriously pugilistic boyfriend Pete Doherty managed to avoid any repetition of his recent fisticuffs.
But as the night wore on, the Alisters were joined by dozens of unknown revellers in increasingly outlandish fetish gear, in keeping with the theme of the bash thrown in honour of fashion photographer Nick Knight.
Fuelled, no doubt, by the free champagne provided by the sponsors, and perhaps mistakenly thinking their identities were completely hidden by their flimsy masks, many of the revellers appeared to lose all their inhibitions, not to mention their dignity.
One young beauty guzzled so much free champagne that she ended up slumped unconscious in a broom cupboard with friends fanning her with a scuba-diving flipper to bring her around.
Despite the somewhat surreal entertainments on offer, including an "operating theatre" in which celebrities could perform "surgery" on a human skeleton, the toilets, curiously, proved to be the most popular room in the house.
Guests queued around corners to get into the loos, and often shared cubicles, giggling and chattering behind the closed toilet doors.
But the biggest surprise of the night came when Kate Moss and Pete Doherty decided to leave early, despite the vast quantities of free alcohol on offer.
Miss Moss, it seems, objected to the presence of Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Mirror, which famously caught her on film snorting cocaine.
"Where the f***'s Piers Morgan?" she screamed, before storming off into the night.
