Only three months ago she described herself as ‘battered and bruised’ by the vicious backlash to her trip into space on Jeff Bezos‘s Blue Origin rocket but courageously reassured fans that she would ‘keep looking to the light’.
Earlier this week, however, Katy Perry was instead gazing into the clear blue eyes of dreamboat ex-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau across a restaurant table in Montreal.
What a remarkable change in fortunes for a pop star who’d been having a pig of a year, both professionally and privately, one that reached its nadir just a month ago when she announced her split from her actor fiancé Orlando Bloom.
The dinner was also a welcome development for Trudeau, once the darling of the liberal Western world – especially the female half – but who dramatically resigned in January as his popularity plummeted amid a string of scandals and setbacks, including his 2023 split from wife Sophie.
On Monday evening, however, the battle-scarred pair put the damaging headlines and unfortunate break-ups behind them at super-hip Le Violon – named Canada‘s ‘Best New Restaurant’ when it opened last year – where they spent several hours chatting as they ploughed through the ‘chef’s tasting menu’ (including tuna, steak tartare, lobster and lamb).
They later had cocktails at a nearby terrace bar where it was claimed (although there is no photographic evidence) that Trudeau had his arm ‘practically welded’ to Perry’s waist.
But today the Daily Mail can reveal that everything may not be quite what it seems, with one specialist in the dark arts of celebrity public relations claiming that Trudeau may have been the victim of a manipulative, fading pop star looking for love.
Rob Shuter, a former celebrity publicist who once represented disgraced music mogul Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs, revealed to the Daily Mail that sources close to the couple had told him that Perry ‘really likes’ Trudeau and thought their dinner was a ‘date’. The retired politician, however – while he’d enjoyed her company – considered it was ‘no more than dinner’.
Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau spotted on a cosy ‘dinner date’ has sparked rumours of a budding romance between the pair
Katy Perry performing on her ‘Lifetimes Tour’ in California. The tour is made up of 92 shows across the globe
Former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau separated from his wife Sophie Grégoire in 2023 after 18 years of marriage
Shuter added: ‘I’ve heard [Trudeau] feels a bit ambushed by all this.’
Ambushed? Shuter’s information is that Perry set up the dinner – and possibly Trudeau, too. ‘He wanted tickets to her show and she invited him,’ he said. ‘While that was going on, she invited him for dinner.’
If Perry did set up the rendezvous, it has helpfully catapulted her into the spotlight at a time when she badly needs some good publicity. The Teenage Dream singer’s 84-date world tour got off to a rocky start in April when fans criticised her lacklustre dance moves, underwhelming vocals and clunky costumes, while ticket sales are said to have been disappointing.
Meanwhile, Trudeau also finds himself struggling to rebuild his tarnished reputation and find a new career at the relatively young age of 53.
He would probably benefit from a public ‘showmance’, too. Toronto publicist Natasha Koifman told Canada’s CBC News she had little doubt the pair wanted to be seen, as there must have been far more discreet options than a window table at the hottest restaurant in town.
‘I think that was actually probably a strategic move,’ she said. ‘I think it elevates both of their brands, for very different reasons, to be seen together.’
Using the jargon of her industry, she described their unlikely connection as a ‘really great brand and reputational move’.
Staff at the restaurant, including its chef, who chatted briefly with the couple, have insisted there was ‘no PDA’ (public display of affection) between them. And friends of Perry are also reportedly dubious, saying she never normally keeps matters of the heart to herself but has been silent about Trudeau.
Perry with her former fiancé Orlando Bloom. The pair first got together in 2016 but split up earlier this year
Trudeau pictured with his former wife Sophie Grégoire. They have three children together: Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien
The couple couldn’t have been less discreet. The Daily Mail was told that far from trying to be private about their meet-up, they made no attempt to disguise their booking and chose a fashionable restaurant that often has paparazzi or celebrity watchers waiting outside.
Then, as if to maximise the chance of being spotted, they sat at a table near a window and later visited the kitchen to thank the staff.
And they didn’t just meet up for dinner. It has emerged that they’d spent part of the preceding afternoon together, walking one of her dogs in a local park. And two days later, on Wednesday evening, Trudeau was photographed with his 16-year-old daughter in prime seats at the Montreal date of Perry’s Lifetimes tour.
Neither Perry, 40, nor Trudeau have yet commented on the fevered speculation, with the result that Canadians, who usually like to think they’re too high-minded to be interested in such tittle-tattle, have been wondering whether the politician once dubbed the ‘Crown Prince of Woke’ had followed in the footsteps of his lady-killer father with the singer dubbed the ‘Queen of Camp’.
Like his son, Pierre Trudeau served as Canada’s PM, retiring in 1984 after 15 years in office. After separating from Justin’s mother Margaret in 1977, he was romantically linked with a string of glamorous stars including Barbra Streisand, Superman’s Margot Kidder and Sex And The City actress Kim Cattrall. Margaret Trudeau was not exactly a nun either, enjoying affairs with Jack Nicholson and Ryan O’Neal, and hanging out with the Rolling Stones.
Is history now repeating itself, some ask.
Apart from being thrown together in adversity there’s precious little else that they have in common – apart, that is, from the weird coincidence of both having had their Left-wing ‘progressive’ credentials tarnished by ‘blackface’ scandals.
Trudeau was severely embarrassed in 2019 when it was revealed that he had worn skin-darkening make-up three times in his past – twice with an Afro wig. The pictures emerged just five weeks before a general election but he survived after grovelling to voters, saying he ‘should have known better’.
Perry’s blackface crisis blew up the very same year after one of the designs in her range of Katy Perry shoes – blue eyes and red lips on black leather –was deemed to be racist.
Online critics compared it with ‘painful images’ of blackface. The offence was hardly on a par with Trudeau’s but she apologised and immediately withdrew them from sale.
Perry, the daughter of two Pentecostal pastors, originally tried to launch her music career as a wholesome Christian singer but when that didn’t work, she had a drastic re-think and played the sex kitten, scoring a No 1 hit in 2008 with her raunchy first single, I Kissed A Girl.
After weathering a 2010 marriage to Russell Brand that lasted 14 months, she became one of the biggest-selling music artists ever – with sales of more than 143 million records – but critics say her brand of bubbly pop stagnated years ago, along with her tiresome theme of hyper-sexualised female empowerment. Perry still has more than 104 million followers on X but that doesn’t mean they all love her.
For many, devotion has turned to contempt as she appeared to become increasingly desperate to rediscover commercial success – she hasn’t had a top-ten hit since 2016.
Last year’s Woman’s World was supposed to be her great comeback record but was mocked as a cynical attempt to cash in on Kamala Harris’s ill-fated presidential run.
It was on an album that flopped and, to make matters worse, she made it with a producer who’d been accused of raping a woman.
Her image as a compassionate feminist took another knock when, in 2015, she embarked on a protracted and ugly dispute with two elderly nuns to turn their former convent into her glitzy new home. Perry was allegedly so aggressive that one nun’s dying words were: ‘Katy Perry, please stop.’
So she was already drawing considerable online flak when, in April, she joined Jeff Bezos’s all-female Blue Origin space flight, singing Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World to her fellow passengers, and the online abuse soared off the chart.
Perry’s fame and post-mission theatrics – bending down to kiss the ground on landing after the ten-minute flight – helped ensure that she took most of the vitriol when the flight was engulfed in a monumental backlash.
Critics lambasted it as a frivolous and tone-deaf PR stunt that ignored the huge environmental cost of space tourism. Even the fast-food chain Wendy’s joined in, mockingly asking: ‘Can we send her back?’ Perry complained that social media had turned her into a ‘human pinata’.
In June, there was more drama when it was confirmed that she and Orlando Bloom, 48, had separated after nine years. They’d been engaged since 2019 and Perry gave birth to their daughter, Daisy, in 2020.
Although they are reportedly on amicable terms and share parenting duties, some believe Bloom rubbed salt into the wound of their break-up by attending the late June wedding of Perry’s great pal Lauren Sanchez to Jeff Bezos in Venice – despite Perry being unable to attend because she was performing in Australia.
Dinner and drinks with a human pinata is not calculated to burnish anyone’s reputation, but Justin Trudeau is hardly Mr Popular either nowadays.
According to political pundits, he was afflicted by essentially the same problem as Perry – the public got sick of the sight of him during ten years as Canadian PM, during which he and the media couldn’t get enough of each other.
Canadians have barely heard or seen anything of their once ubiquitous leader since he stepped down in March under pressure from his own Liberal Party. Amid serious economic problems, in part due to his open-door policy on legal immigration, and plummeting poll ratings, he’d become a huge political liability.
He didn’t even try to keep his parliamentary seat in the federal election in late April.
As his star waned, Canadians were reminded of the various scandals that he’d survived when he was far more popular. They included three ethical controversies in which he was personally singled out for official criticism.
But his critics were riled as much as anything by Trudeau’s stratospheric smugness and wokery – he was a master of style over substance who, alongside his equally narcissistic wife, would post photos online ranging from their impressively athletic yoga positions to them and their three children ridiculously dressed in traditional costumes during a 2018 trip to India.
In 2011, he performed a partial striptease at a charity gala and, ahead of the 2016 Invictus Games for disabled veterans, did some show-off press-ups for the media.
US Vogue rated him one of the sexiest men alive, fawning over how he was a ‘feminist and capable of balancing a baby on one hand’. And Trudeau’s wokeness reached new heights in 2018, when he corrected a woman for using the word ‘mankind’, telling her: ‘We like to say ‘peoplekind’.’
The 2023 collapse of his marriage to Sophie, a former TV presenter and close friend of the Duchess of Sussex, was hardly a surprise given they’d admitted to having problems for years. Trudeau denied rumours of infidelity, although his wife was more ambiguous when asked.
The ex-wife of an Ottawa paediatric surgeon named Marcos Bettolli later claimed in court papers that he’d been in a romantic relationship with Sophie some months before the Trudeaus announced they were separating.
Trudeau, however, has not been linked with any woman since the split until now and he was reportedly anxious to concentrate on bringing up their three children: Xavier, 17, Ella-Grace, 16, and Hadrien, 11.
Xavier, incidentally, is trying to break into the music business and has just released his first record – a topic that one hopes came up with Perry.
After all, if love really does blossom between North America’s unlikeliest couple, they need to find something more than their terrible approval ratings to talk about.
