Fashionista Lady Mary Charteris speaks out over designers paying celebrities to appear on the front row Few fashionistas have been willing to speak publicly about Nicole Farhi's claim that celebrities are paid to appear on the front rows at catwalk shows. Lady Mary Charteris is, though, prepared to stand out from the crowd. "They really want the right people on the front row," the Earl of Wemyss's daughter tells me at the launch of Marni for H&M. "They pay people to be on the front row to show off the clothes where everyone can see them. That is where all of the photographs are taken. Mike Read has gone one better with the revival of his stage show about Oscar Wilde, which closed after a single performance in London in 2004 and was described by one newspaper as "the worst musical in the world, ever." The new production has had to be abandoned even before opening night. Read, 65, tells me that the theatre where Oscar was due to be performed is being demolished. "The curse of Oscar has struck again," he adds with a stoical laugh. Still, he insists that the Above the Stag Theatre in Victoria is looking for a new home and, once it has found one, the management has promised him that his show will be the first that they put on. Money talks It's not just in acting where the moneyed classes now dominate. Sarah Teather, the Lib Dem MP, says it's the same in politics. "If you're not rich, then you'd have to be foolish to stand," she says at the Macmillan Parliamentary Palace of Varieties.