Laying it on thick

If product placement makes you bad tempered then yesterday’s papers won’t have done much good for your blood pressure.

Whatever were Lurpak thinking, letting their spreadable butter be featured on the Number 10 breakfast table in Cameron’s Sunday Times photoshoot? How sad that this revolutionary foodstuff, probably the best invention since the internet, will now be forever tainted by spin.

Even more devastating, however, was the revelation that a carefully positioned copy of Literary Review will appear on M’s desk in the new Bond film. “For your highbrows only!” proclaimed the Mail on Sunday, in the kind of headline that gives punning a bad name.

The scandal, it transpired, was that while car and watch companies fork out millions to be endorsed by 007, the hard-up magazine was paying nothing for its plug. The Mail, desperate to find a sinister explanation, wondered if the fact the Literary Review’s deputy editor is a great nephew of Ian Fleming might have something to do with it.