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Staying positive: Helen Mirren, L'Oreal's new brand ambassador

The French cosmetics firm, L'Oreal, which claims to be the biggest in the world, has caused great excitement in London by choosing Dame Helen Mirren to be its new brand ambassador.

This is entirely because the Oscar winning British actress is 69.

Personally I happen to think it's an excellent choice. When she held a press conference, opposite Om Puri, to promote her latest movie, The Hundred-Foot Journey, in which she is cast as a haughty French woman, she came across as a confident, graceful and elegant woman.

You could easily cast her in a remake of The Graduate, in which a young student (Dustin Hoffman) is more than willing to be seduced by an older woman (Anne Bancroft). Bengali cinema should really experiment with this theme. But I digress.

L'Oreal's choice of Mirren, who got an Oscar for her lead role in The Queen, is seen as an acknowledgement that women do not have to be rendered invisible once they cross 40. Incidentally, I love the photograph in Private Eye of Mirren meeting the Queen at a Buckingham Palace reception and asking the monarch, 'Do you come here often?' But I digress again.

In her short statement, Mirren said: 'I hope I can inspire other women towards greater confidence by making the most of their natural good looks. We are all worth it!'

'I am not gorgeous and I never was, but I was always ok-looking and I'm keen to stay that way,' she added.

It remains to be seen whether she will be used in India, which is a growing market for L'Oreal. Of the four Indian women who are L'Oreal 'ambassadors', only Freida Pinto is listed by the firm's headquarters, L'Oreal Paris.

The three others — Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Sonam Kapoor and Katrina Kaif (she was unwise to give Cannes a miss this year) — are listed only under L'Oreal Paris India. This suggests it's very much horses for courses.

Freida and Katrina are 30, Sonam a year younger. Aishwarya is 40. In the words of The Beatles' song, will L'Oreal still need her, will L'Oreal still feed her when Ash is 64?

According to L'Oreal, Mirren's 'spontaneous warmth and natural modesty along with her looks and intellect are part of her positive attitude to ageing'.

It would be good if L'Oreal were now to try and find Mirren's counterparts in India. But who are they?

Diwali delight

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  Sari story: Samantha and David Cameron. Picture by Raj D. Bakrania

Samantha Cameron is a stylish woman often photographed sitting by catwalks as she tries to do her bit for the British fashion industry. She looked perfect in a blue silk sari when she accompanied her husband to the Conservative Party's Diwali party last week for about a thousand Indians held at the spacious Queen Elizabeth II conference centre five minutes' walk from Downing Street.

Jitesh Gadhia, a Tory party supporter, said he had wanted to keep it quiet that his wife, Angeli, had gone to Downing Street and helped Samantha put on her sari. But the secret was out when Lord Feldman, the Conservative Party co-chairman, publicly thanked the Gadhias.

SamCam, as the tabloids call Samantha Cameron, and the Prime Minister lit the ceremonial diya, before Cameron gave a speech appealing for Indian votes in next May's general election.

Whatever the election result, Samantha gets to keep the sari plus all the accessories she wore on the night.

Crash landing

Since the Indian parliamentary system is modelled partly on Westminster, it may be worth following the measures being planned to recall errant MPs. Under the Bill being refined by the Commons, an MP will be deselected and a by-election declared if 10 per cent of the electorate sign a petition in support of a recall.

There are obvious candidates for immediate recall in India. It has been reported that a group of 25 MPs have summoned senior Air India management to appear before a panel to explain why they were not given the best seats during their recent tour of India.

The parliamentary committee on welfare of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes was undertaking a five-day long 'study tour' (junket?) of Chennai, Raipur and Hyderabad.

When it was pointed out that those seats had been booked by ordinary passengers, the MPs apparently demanded those bookings be cancelled to accommodate the parliamentarians.

Panel chairman Faggan Singh Kulaste, alleged to be the BJP member for Mandla in Madhya Pradesh, was reported as saying: 'There was no one from their side to coordinate with us at the airport. MPs were also not given priority in allotment of seats.'

Air India should be congratulated for insisting that if a seat is booked, it's booked.

If these were British MPs, they would all have been named and suspended, with the press making sure they were seeking alternative employment.

Take off

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  India bound: Seema Malhotra in a Heathrow flight simulator

A rising star in the Labour party is MP Seema Malhotra, 42, whose constituency, Feltham and Heston, which she won in a by-election in 2011, has a strong connection with Heathrow — many of her constituents work at the airport.

In August, Ed Miliband appointed her to Labour's home affairs team as 'shadow minister for preventing violence against women and girls'.

She plans to visit India soon, partly because of '(criminal) patterns of behaviour in the Asian community where we need to say, 'we're going to put a stop to this'.'

She gives the example of a devious British Indian man who went to India and brought his bride to Britain but did not regularise her visa even though he had children with her. Keen to return to India and come back with a new woman, he reported his distraught wife to the police as an 'illegal'.

I do hope Narendra Modi gives Seema some time because she approves strongly of the Indian Prime Minister's 'focus on 'end violence against women' in his Independence Day speech'.

Real princess

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  Cover girl: Princess Margaret

In the search for real English beauty, Tatler has gone back in time and done an evocative cover story on Princess Margaret, the Queen's younger sister, who died in 2002, aged 71.

Tatler calls her 'The Ultimate Princess'.

She was a party girl who smoke, drank and had lovers. Her wedding to photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones was watched by 300 million people worldwide. Margaret's early photographs, black and white, show she was stunningly beautiful. The point is they belong to an England which has vanished.

Gifted a gold embroidered dress from India, she said: 'I have always longed to have a dress like that — it's what a real princess would wear.'

Tittle tattle

Lord Swraj Paul has stirred it up by suggesting that the British government foot the entire £1m bill for erecting Mahatma Gandhi's statue in Parliament Square — 'otherwise Britain's gift is not a gift'.

But economist Lord Meghnad Desai, the trustee charged with raising the money has made a convincing case for doing so through public subscription.

'Even the money for Churchill's statue was raised through public donations,' he points out. 'Asking the British government suggests Indians are not willing to give money for a statue of Mahatma Gandhi.'

With a 2m Indian population, 50p a head should do it.