Heather finds a niche

Whoever would have thought? Heather Mills' vegan restaurant is doing kind of alright. Although it's not just the meat that had been removed, according to the Evening Argus:

Diary-free, eh? That's great news, as I can't stand dates.

The precise measure of success, though, seems a bit shady:

And it seems the former model’s new venture is changing many people’s attitudes towards vegan food, as between 700 and 1,000 vegan products are sold at the venue every day.

I've not, I think, heard of a restaurant hail the number of items it sells rather than covers served, money taken or profit made. The sense this is a bit of a rewritten press-release doesn't let up further in to the article:

The cafe’s cakes, which are transported around on a travelator similar to that found in sushi bars, are also proving to be a popular treat for those with a sweet tooth. About 1,000 are being sold every week.

A travelator? You mean a conveyor belt, surely? A conveyor belt similar to that in every supermarket in the country?

The cafe’s website has also been popular, with more than 3,000 hits on VBites’ opening day.

Hmm. This is starting to sound a little desperate now. What next?

"The window of the restuarant has been a hit, too. On opening day alone, there were seventeen and a half eyes peeking through the windows in every half-hour period."

Heather didn't go with the Mills Of God, then

Heather Mills' latest bid to reinvent herself is to turn herself into a kind of cruelty-free Colonel Sanders. She's opening a vegan restaurant in Hove, which she believes will be franchised out around the world:

The Argus can exclusively reveal that Ms Mills’ latest venture called V-Bites will open at Hove Lagoon in July.

V Bites? Maybe you should register plans for a juice bar chain called H Sucks while you're at it.

The idea - a vegan food chain - isn't a bad one in itself, although the lack of a successful vegetarian chain, despite there being more vegetarians than vegans, suggests the business planning might have been a bit weak. And Heather doesn't seem sure what sort of place it is:

“It has been made into a very hip 21st century place.”

So it's a hip, high-end place? Sounds expensive.

Ms Mills said the menu will be affordable and visitors to the nearby park will also be able to buy vegan burgers from a serving hatch.

It's a hip, high-end place with a cheap burger hatch?

Ms Mills said that each room would have a different feel to it, with one turned into a family creche area where children can play with interactive screens which will teach them about different fruits and vegetables and a dining area which will serve a daily selection of vegan dishes from around the world.

"Mummy! Mummy! Can we go to the restaurant where we can learn about the kumquat today? Pleeeeeease..."

[Mills] said: “It’s for everybody. It will be very family orientated during the day but it will be for all ages. My grandmother lived here for 38 years so I really want it to be somewhere elderly people can go as well.

“It is going to be really funky, with nice music and ambience and good staff.”

So it's funky and hip, for children and the elderly, pushing burgers through a slot... I'm not sure, but I suspect Mills may have ended the tour by telling The Argus that the restaurant will also be able to fly, and special singing potatoes will provide makeovers at the Fairy-powered clamshell.

Vegan food: very expensive

David Hepworth points out that Heather Mills' million dollars of vegan food turns out to be a single cook-out for a thousand people.

Perhaps she's had to build a massive kitchen to hold them all. Otherwise, that's going to be a bloody big meal.

Heather Mills: Where's the beef

It would be wrong, of course, to condemn a woman for an act of charity too harshly, but in this instance, it's difficult to say where the condemnation might start to reach the point of too harsh.

It's undeniable that the Bronx suffers from pockets of terrible poverty; and that children there often have bad diets and relatively high levels of obesity. Heather Mills response?

She has - very, very publicly - donated a million dollars worth of soy burgers and soy chicken cutlets to the borough.

Clearly, she's forgotten the old adage 'give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he will eat for life; give a room full of kids a soyburger and you'll find an awful lot of soyburgers shoved into the flowerpots round the edge of the room.

It's well-meaning - if you can get past the suspicion that it's more about Mills than the obese kids of the Brox - but completely misses the point; a million dollars would be better spent helping create the conditions in which better nutrition is a choice, rather than swamping the area with a brief pulse of food made from pulses.

Mills' infiltration plans fall apart

Heather Mills' super-secret plans to infiltrate the powerful and rich to make everyone do her bidding seems to have hit a snag. While GM-TV were happy to run interviews (more like pieces-to-camera, to be honest) when she was sobbing about her nasty divorce, it turns out they're less keen to let her use the sofa to promote her vegan interests.

The Mirror's Nicola Methven is relieved:

She'd only urge everyone to drink rat's milk. Yuck!

Not, surely, for a vegan campaign, Nicola?

Not one of the better days for Heather Mills

It probably seemed a great idea - get Heather Mills out to do some simple campaign work, help her image a little. A campaign to discourage people from eating meat to reduce the gases which contribute to global warming generated by cows.

What could go wrong? Everyone loves being kind to angimals, and hardly anyone is fond of global warming.

And, at first, the Sun seems to be struggling to find something to pick on her about:

Not ONE member of the public turned up to see her launch a campaign by vegetarian group Viva!

- which, considering it was a press launch rather than a public event, isn't that surprising.

The paper also tuts over the (supposedly) sexy poses in advertising campaign:

Passer-by Mark Clews, 25, said of the raunchy poster: “It looks like one of her porn poses. I can’t believe she does this and then moans about being in the spotlight.”

Mark Clews, you'll notice, is simultaneously a passer-by without being a member of the public; for The Sun to try and get annoyed by a picture of a woman in a swimsuit - even a woman dubbed Mucca-because-of-her-porn-past - seems to be so obviously hypocritical that it must be self-parody.

So, Heather could have won a moral victory. Instead... well, she managed to do both herself and the animal rights campaign look stupid and self-defeating:

She said: “There are 25 alternative types of milk.

“Why do we not try drinking rats’ milk, cats’ milk or dogs’ milk?”

Oddly, though, although there are many grounds on which this statement could be ripped to shreds - surely, there are as many types of milk as there are mammals, isn't there?; the idea of drinking rat's milk, what with their famous connection to plague and rubbish, is a commercial dead end - The Sun seeks out a "milk production" expert, Ben Mepham, who offers the weakest ever objection to splashing rat lactations on your Frosties:

“It sounds ludicrous to me. How on Earth would you get the milk out?”

... and where would you find a milking stool low enough, eh?

Trouble is, Heather makes a David Cameron sized mistake. When offering advice on curbing global warming, you need to set a good example:

Heather arrived to make her green appeal in a two-car convoy. She kept the engine running while she gave a string of interviews in a £35,000 black Mercedes 4x4.

Oops.

And then she decided to tell a bare-faced lie:

Mucca also yesterday denied comparing herself to Kate McCann as she clashed in an interview with LBC radio presenter Nick Ferrari.

Heather, you did it on television. This was a deep-cover unattributable briefing, you were on a breakfast sofa. As the Telegraph transcribed it at the time:

Comparing herself to Kate McCann and Princess Diana Ms Mills McCartney continued: “Look what they’re doing to the McCanns.

"The woman has lost, and the poor father, have lost their daughter. What are we doing as a nation?

“What are we doing persecuting a woman that is devastated behind closed doors and trying to hold it together, as I have for 18 months."

A whole string of PR disasters; you wonder if she's ever thought that, perhaps, withdrawing from the public eye might be better for her image.

Meat (free) Conor Oberst

A quick plug for PETA's video interview with Conor Oberst, the acceptable musical face of veganism (i.e. not the one you want to slap - hello, Moby).

It's curious that the meat eating, fox-killing majority don't manage to get anyone cool to talk on their behalf - aside from the people tempted to by McDonald's cash to promote their products. Nobody ever really pops up saying "Meat is cool", do they?