Gordon in the morning: Mercury rising

Yesterday, readers of Gordon's column were sent to the bookies almost certain of a Mercury win for Florence And The Machine, mainly - admittedly - on the strength of 'giving Gordon an excuse to print a sexy picture':

FLORENCE WELCH is the front-runner to scoop glory at tonight's Mercury Music Awards.

And if she does bag the 20 grand prize for 2009's best album, I suspect that by the end of the evening she could be pulling a similar pose to this - crawling around London's Grosvenor House Hotel.

So, this morning Sun readers must be... apparently not at all surprised at the outcome:

The Sun's Something For The Weekend section said last week that Speech was the "most deserving" nominee.

Still, regardless of Speech's win, Gordon knows where the moral victory is, and marks the occasion with a large, sexy photo of Florence Welch in a short leather skirt.

Elsewhere, Yoko Ono popped up at the GQ "man of the year" awards. You can calibrate how well-judged these prizes are by considering that they believe Guy Ritchie to be filmmaker of the year and George Osbourne to be politician of the year (a view which even David Cameron would double-take.) Yoko's appearance was yet another part of the grinding publicity for the Beatles Game ("was quite a coup for the magazine publishers"), but she ended up being asked to talk about Take That:

Beaming Yoko said: "I love Shine. I know most of their greatest hits. They're a great British band."

It might sound like faint praise to you, but she didn't have to write any of the names on her hand, and she didn't go "that one from the adverts with Alan Hansen in - that's one of theirs, isn't it?"

Gordon, though, senses high praise:

And the feeling's mutual.

Mark said: "It's amazing that Yoko thinks that about our music. It is an honour to accept an award from her."

"I quite like some of their greatest hits" and "it's nice that Yoko quite likes our greatest hits". Mutual love-in, isn't it?

By the time this has been processed for an article teaser, it comes out as this:

Yoko Ono: TT are new Fab 4

JOHN Lennon’s widow is a big fan of the man band – naming Shine as her favourite track

Or at least the one that somebody whispered in her ear before she went on stage.