Gordon in the morning: Brits ahoy

Of course, for the papers, the live transmission of the Brits is a bit of a nightmare - the morning titles are now sent for publication so early, the presses start rolling before the ceremony finishes, which means that the paper version of Bizarre is quite lucky to have any shots of the event at all - although the sharp-eyed will spot that the onstage shots come from the very start of the event. Given the chance to pick from all the live performances, would they really have chosen Ditto and Mika rather than, say, Kylie or Rhianna?

The Sun gets some coverage onto the news pages under the headline Leona Lewses, which is both a rubbish pun (unless she's planning to move to the county town of East Sussex out of shame) and a really odd angle to take.

As Pete Samson points out, though, the much-predicted "Pop hits back" story for the event proved to be a duff sell, with the Monkeys, Foos and Nash scooping armfuls of prizes for the rock-ish tendency.

With deadlines working against him, Gordon fills his spread with Cheryl Cole, of bloody course, burbling esxcitedly about a "secret summit" between Cole and Cole "just hours before" the Brits. Once again, though, Gordon's lead story points out that his big claims on Tuesday were useless, as it turns out that not only was Ashley not in the UK on C-Day, but, erm, neither was Cheryl, as she flew in yesterday:

Yet just hours earlier she held the secret summit with England and Chelsea ace Ashley after he begged her to see him when she jetted back from Los Angeles yesterday afternoon.

So, the big C-Day summit and the participants weren't even on the same continent. Still, it's apparently finally happened.

So, what was the outcome, Gordon? (Actually, we say Gordon - he shares the byline on the story with Richard White, but we suspect Gordo's bits are the gossips nuggets from the Brits.)

“Cole knew this was his last chance, but he still hasn’t been forgiven. Just a couple of hours before the Brits they had a showdown and Cheryl was a wreck.

“All the recovering she has done in the last three weeks was blown away by seeing Ashley again.”

So, nobody really knows.

The actual interesting part of the story isn't anything to do with the Cole circus:

Cheryl’s band-mate NADINE COYLE failed to attend the lavish Brits ceremony in Earls Court.

She was expected to claim she had lost her passport, preventing her from flying in from LA.

But band sources said it was her way of saying she wants no more to do with Girls Aloud, who were up for Best Group.

Perhaps she just didn't want to be on the plane with Cheryl running through her speech for Ashley over and over.