Jeremy Clarkson's VERY racy party girls: Grand Tour star is pictured with a host of society's most eligible women at New Year's Eve party 

By Sebastian Shakespeare for the Daily Mail

Published: 20:48 EST, 1 January 2017 | Updated: 06:45 EST, 2 January 2017

How does Jeremy Clarkson do it? Looking bleary-eyed and clad in an open-necked shirt that did little to disguise his middleaged paunch, the former Top Gear host found himself set upon by a veritable harem of society’s most eligible women.

Looking bleary-eyed and clad in an open-necked shirt that did little to disguise his middleaged paunch, the former Top Gear host found himself set upon by a veritable harem of society’s most eligible women

Clarkson, 56, who is separated from his second wife Frances Cain, with whom he has three children, saw in the New Year at a party in Oxfordshire with (from left) socialite Jemima Goldsmith, 42, stylist Martha Ward, 40, artist Suzy Murphy, 52, and their pal Caro Hick, 42.

Posing for a photo, Goldsmith and Ward placed their hands possessively on Clarkson’s chest, while Hick draped a bare leg over his knee. 

Next to the snap, Jemima wrote online: ‘To all Top Gear fans, Jeremy Clarkson is fine.’ Evidently so. 

 

Best known as gruff Scottish detective Rebus, veteran actor Ken Stott is struggling to come to terms with the new screen world in which male stars are expected to have buff physiques. 

‘Forget drama school — just go to the gym and get fit,’ is the 62-year-old’s tongue-in-cheek advice for today’s acting wannabes.

‘We only need superheroes now, nothing else. I seem to find myself working with people who have not been to drama school; we’re losing the language that used to unify us about how to rehearse and approach a script. I find it very chilling.’

 

Clarkson, 56, is separated from his second wife Frances Cain, with whom he has three children

Trollope: Why I would never be a housewife 

Labelled the ‘Queen of the Aga saga’ thanks to her bestselling novels set in cosy, middle-class homes in the countryside, Joanna Trollope would never be a housewife herself.

‘Work gives you a validity and recognition,’ says the 73-year-old, who toiled at the Foreign Office and as a teacher before finding fame as an author. ‘It makes me feel fulfilled.’

Trollope adds: ‘I’m of a generation where it was quite rare for a woman to work. My mother didn’t but, I think, rather longed to. But in my daughter’s generation, it’s amazing if a woman doesn’t work.’

Divorced from her second husband, dramatist Ian Curteis, Trollope is in a relationship with musician Jason Kouchak, who is 31 years her junior.

But she is cynical about the longevity of romance: ‘Love is a glorious insanity, but it is an insanity. That heady stage when you could listen to them reading the phone book with rapture doesn’t last long.’

 

Sharing her aunt Princess Diana’s striking looks, Lady Eliza Spencer was never going to be short of suitors. 

So it’s no surprise that, less than a year after splitting up with financier Matthew Rozowsky, Earl Spencer’s 24-year-old daughter is off the market. 

Sharing her aunt Princess Diana’s striking looks, Lady Eliza Spencer was never going to be short of suitors

Her new beau is Channing Millerd, 23 (pictured with Eliza), a marketing executive who attended the same school as Eliza’s brother, Viscount Althorp. 

Channing has a two-year-old son from a past relationship. Eliza and her new man are clearly head-over-heels. Next to one snap online, she gushed: ‘I just adore you.’

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