Mums

The family holiday has been left in doubt after she discovered her daughter’s passport did not meet strict travel rules

A singer has issued a plea for help after discovering at the last minute that her daughter’s passport could fail strict travel rules. Rules mean there must be a set amount of time available on a passport or the holder will not be allowed to travel.

Under rules following Brexit people travelling to EU countries, except Ireland, along with Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and Vatican City must have at least three months left on their passports after the day they plan to leave, warns ABTA. The passport must also have been issued less than 10 years before the date of arrival at the country.

Musician and singer Philippa Hanna turned to Facebook to seek advice after her family holiday to Portugal appeared to be in jeopardy. The Christian music star who has toured with mainstream artists including Lionel Richie, Leona Lewis, Anastacia and Wet Wet Wet, told how she had just discovered that her daughter, Ozma’s, passport would not meet these rules.

She said: “GUYS!! We need help. Do I know ANYONE who works for or is connected to the passport office or something even close? We need emergency advice ahead of our family holiday tomorrow?”

She later went on to explain: “I just found out Ozma has 5 weeks less than needed on her passport for flying to Portugal.” She then added: “We’re only going for 5 days so the week fast track wont work. I’m just wondering if there’s any way of getting an extension or a special permission or something.”

One follower suggested she contact her MP who might be able to speed up getting a new passport. Gayle Hunter, who said she was a former duty manager at an airline, said: “They’re normally strict at least 3 months after the last day you’re leaving on passport. An MP can get you a new one in three hours under parliamentary privilege.”

However this was disputed by another poster who said he worked in the airline industry and travelled extensively. John Dinsdale said he had been stung by the rule himself, and insisted an MP would be unlikely to help. He said: “There is a parliamentary/MP escalation route, but it only applies for compassionate reasons (family death, serious illness) not for holiday travel, so it won’t help here.

“You could try contacting the airline to ask if they’ll allow “OK to board,” but I doubt that’s your best option. Even if they agreed, Schengen countries require a minimum of 90 days’ passport validity, so Portugal border control could still refuse entry on arrival.

“For an airline to allow to board they would need authorisation from the Portuguese immigration department first. If you’re refused entry, the airline will face a fine (amounts vary by country), and you’d likely be liable for the cost of the return flight, airlines won’t board anyone without valid travel documents in the first place.

“I’ve actually been on the receiving end of this myself, I can’t get an ESTA for the US because of my travel history, apparently America don’t like Iraqi stamps in passports, so I know firsthand how strict airlines are about not boarding anyone without the right documents. It’s not something they’ll bend on.

“Realistically, a new passport won’t be issued in time even by fast track. I’d contact your travel insurer now to ask about cancellation/rebooking cover, I know this is not what you want to hear, but it’s the most likely outcome.”

What the government says

So what are the rules? According to the government there are steps you can take – but it usually still takes some time.

It advises: “You can pay to get a passport urgently if you think the standard service will take too long.” It explains there are 2 ways to apply for an urgent passport.

1 day premium

According to the government website the earliest you can get an appointment is 2 days after you apply. It says: “You’ll need to hand in your old passport at your appointment. Your new passport will be ready to collect from the passport office 4 hours after your appointment.

“You can only use this service to renew an adult passport. It costs £239.50 (or £253.50 for a 54-page frequent traveller passport).”

1 week fast track

With this one the earliest you can get an appointment is the next day after you apply. It advises: “Your new passport will be delivered to you by courier 1 week after your appointment.”

You can use this service to:

• renew a passport
• change personal details on your passport (for example your name, place of birth or gender)
• replace a lost, stolen or damaged passport
• get a child passport

It costs £192 for an adult passport (or £206 for a 54-page frequent traveller passport). A child passport is £156.50 (or £170.50 for a 54-page frequent traveller passport).

Is there anything any faster?

It advises: “If you need to travel urgently for medical treatment, on government business, or because a friend or family member is seriously ill or has died, call the Passport Adviceline instead.”

GEMMA Collins has opened up about her journey with grief after heartbreakingly losing her mum.

The former Towie star announced earlier this week that her beloved mum Joan had passed away after several years of health issues.

Now, Gemma says her grief is ‘coming in waves’ and detailed how she is healing during the difficult time.

In a new Instagram post, the star shared a picture of a memorial area set up for her mum – containing a framed picture of them together, flowers, and candles.

She captioned the snap: “Grief is the price we pay for love. ❤️

“Thank you from the bottom of my heart for every message, every prayer, every kind word. I’m reading them all and getting back to everyone slowly. Please bear with me. Some moments I feel okay, and then it comes in waves.

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“One beautiful thing keeps happening. A butterfly has been with me constantly, appearing wherever I go.

“It brings me a sense of peace, and in my heart I truly feel it’s my mum letting me know she’s close, watching over me, and reminding me that love never really leaves us.”

Gemma continued to say that her fans and friends were ‘holding me up’ – after a wave of tributes piled in for Joan.

She ended the post: “Thank you all for holding me up with your kindness. It means more than you’ll ever know. 🦋🤍

“She loved @paulmccartney and the @thebeatles I’m finding lots of healing listening to the music 🦋🐦‍⬛”.

Gemma announced her mum’s death online earlier this week, sharing how she had passed ‘peacefully’ and was finally ‘out of pain’.

Just last month, Joan was rushed to hospital after being struck down with pneumonia for the second time in the space of six months.

When her mum was admitted to hospital, Gemma told fans she “couldn’t sleep with worry”.

Just six months before her hospital visit at the start of June, Joan was hospitalised with pneumonia again.

She spent five weeks under medical care before Christmas, with Gemma describing the time as the ‘toughest of her life’.

Joan had spent time in medical care several times in recent years.

In March 2020 , she was first taken to hospital with pneumonia and it was reported that she suffers from rheumatoid arthritis.

The condition left her with a heavily compromised immune system and vulnerable to infections.

Four years later in 2024, Gemma was left heartbroken as she told how her mum was in intensive care following a breast cancer diagnosis.

At the time, Joan, who found a cancerous lump between her breast and armpit, was rushed to hospital after she stopped breathing.

I’M A Celeb winner AngryGinge has revealed the surprising cause of his mum’s house fire that saw her house tragically burn down earlier this year.

The devastating fire happened while the YouTube star was playing in Soccer Aid and the family were away from home, and sadly saw them lose three of their pets.

Now, he has revealed what actually caused the fire to happen.

Explaining that the fire was caused by one of the family’s late cats, Ginge – whose real name is Morgan Sam Lee Burtwistle – said it was “mental”.

He shared: “It’s actually like something out of f***ing Tom and Jerry, so what actually caused it, I believe – well the investigation found – is when my mum was out, she was down in the hotel for Soccer Aid, one of the cats jumped on the hob, turned the hob on.

“Knocked something on the hob, that’s then been set alight. It could have gone alight like that [finger click] but it could have also took an hour and then set the whole kitchen alight.

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“Whole kitchen went on fire, then it went to the living room, whole carpets and stairs etc.”

Ginge continued: “It’s crazy.

“They figured it out because the hob that had four things, one side was more burnt than the others, which means that would have had to start it.

“So, that’s how it started, it’s mental. It is genuinely something you’d see in, like, Tom and Jerry.”

The TV and online star has showed fans inside the home since the fire, filming the devastating ruins as he returned to the property following the incident.

Since then, Ginge’s mum has been living with him.

Rachel Nickell’s horrific death sent shockwaves across the UK, but it took the police more than 15 years to solve her murder. As the case is explored in a new Netflix documentary, we speak to the expert who found a breakthrough clue after years of investigation failures

Rachel Nickell had her whole life ahead of her when it was cruelly stolen in a sickening attack – leaving her toddler son as the sole witness.

In July 1992, the 23-year-old mum was strolling through Wimbledon Common with her two-year-old son Alex Hanscombe, and their dog Molly. In a quiet, wooded area, she was ambushed, sexually assaulted and stabbed dozens of times.

Alex was later found by a passerby, desperately clinging to his mother’s body. In a heartbreaking attempt to help, the toddler had placed a piece of paper on her forehead as a makeshift bandage after pleading with her to wake up. Even at that tender age, Alex later revealed, he knew instantly that his mother was never coming back.

The brutal murder shattered the life of Alex and his father André Hanscombe. Yet, it would be 16 years for anyone to face justice. The haunting case is now the subject of a new three-part series for Netflix dramatisation, The Witness, alongside an accompanying documentary featuring never before seen archive footage, and deeply personal accounts from those who lived through the tragedy.

Among those interviewed is legendary forensic scientist Angela Gallop, whose work has helped solve many of the UK’s most high-profile murders, including the killings of Stephen Lawrence and Damilola Taylor.

Her team was handed the case in 2002, a decade after the murder, when the investigation had gone completely cold. They had agonisingly little to work with: a microscopic trace of male DNA recovered from the crime scene. To make matters even more difficult, forensic technology at the time was ill-equipped to handle such a minute sample. In order to find the killer, they had to pioneer an entirely new methodology to examine the sample.

Reinvestigating the decade-old DNA required immense precision. Describing the pressure and the patience required to manipulate the tiny shred of evidence, Angela said: “The technique that had been used at the time was a very new, sensitive method, but we had never particularly liked it in my laboratory.

“For Rachel’s case, we got hints of male DNA using our standard test, but we wanted to see if we could squeeze out some more information. By concentrating and purifying the DNA, we managed to achieve it, but it took two years to develop the technique properly.”

After a painstaking process, the team eventually got a strong enough DNA profile to add to their database – and it matched with a man named Robert Napper, a paranoid schizophrenic and serial rapist.

To ensure the case was ironclad, they raced back to the crime scene and analysed all the sample items that had been collected. Angela and her colleagues then went on to uncover footwear marks and forensic paint evidence linking Napper directly to Wimbledon Common.

His footwear was matched directly to the mud profiles taken from the area, and microscopic paint flakes matching Napper’s toolbox were discovered trapped in the hair of two-year-old Alex. The box, found in Napper’s flat, contained knives and other weapons.

The new DNA breakthrough was enough to convict Napper and exonerate Colin Stagg, the innocent man wrongfully targeted by a flawed police honey-trap operation. A new Netflix documentary will examine the botched investigation, which led to Stagg – a local resident who walked his dog on the common – spending 13 months behind bars in custody, and facing rampant speculation that he killed Rachel.

He was freed by an Old Bailey judge in 1994, who criticised officers for using a ‘honeytrap’ undercover policewoman to try to make him confess to the murder, branding the entrapment evidence as “reprehensible”

Mr Justice Ognall, who halted the trial, described officers actions as “deceptive conduct of the grossest kind” after undercover officer “Lizzie James” tried to seduce Stagg, promising a relationship in the hope of getting a confession. Stagg later received £700,000 compensation from the Home Office.

In 2008, Napper admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and was detained indefinitely at Broadmoor. He was already incarcerated at the psychiatric unit, having been convicted in 1995 for the equally depraved double killing of single mother Samantha Bisset, 27, and her four-year-old daughter Jazmine.

Discovering the match provided a profound sense of justice for Angela’s team, particularly regarding the human toll of the investigation. “We had a DNA result that hit a match on the National DNA database, so the police have got something to investigate,” she said.

“There was an added level of satisfaction because Colin Stagg had been professing his innocence for all those years. We were able to show that he was telling the truth,” she said.

The new documentary about the 1992 murder features Alex describing the moment that he knew his mother had died after being stabbed 49 times.

A home video video captures him describing the moment his mother was killed on Wimbledon Common to his dad André, who gently discusses what his son saw on the day.

Now 36, Alex describes seeing Napper, telling his dad: “I saw him first,” he says, telling Andre that the man was carrying a bag which he opened. Asked what he took out, he replies simply: “A knife.”

He then tells his dad that the man “knocked me over” and that he witnessed his mum being stabbed. “There’s his knife,” the little boy tells his dad, indicating the picture he is drawing of his mother. “I saw the knife. I saw it, Yeah, I saw it all.”

Speaking in the trailer for the film, André explains: “My son saw his mother’s murder but nobody could have possibly known how long it was gonna take to find the person who did this.”

Ahead of the Netflix show, Angela is keen to emphasise that DNA evidence is rarely a simple “magic bullet.” Television would make people think that experts can simply swab a crime scene and receive a clear-cut result just 30 minutes later, Angela said, adding: “If it was going to be really straightforward, the original scientists would have discovered the truth a long time ago.

“You have to be much more clever. Sometimes you have to look for one type of evidence to find another. In the Stephen Lawrence and the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path murders, it was analysing textile fibres that led us to finding blood traces and therefore DNA.”

As well as the archive footage, the documentary will explore how Angela’s work led to justice for Stagg after her breakthrough solved the case.

The three part drama, The Witness, will follow Alex and André as they deal with the devastating impact of losing Rachel. Jordan Bolger plays André, while Max Fincham is the teenage Alex. Both men acted as consultants on the series.

The story aims to show how a father and son “moved through the aftermath of unimaginable tragedy, from darkness into light.”

The other cast include Kevin Eldon as DCI Mick Wickerson, Neil Maskell as DI Keith Pedder, Mark Stanley as DS Ivan Agnew, Jon Pointing as DC Nick Sparshatt, James Dryden as DC Paul Miller, Kerry Godliman as André’s mother June, James Bradshaw as DCI Tony Nash and Claire Rushbrook as Dr. Jean Harris-Hendriks.

In a joint statement released last month, André and Alex Hanscombe said: “Our life has been a battle. We can never express how indebted we are to everyone that’s been a part of this, for the kindness and generosity they’ve extended to us, for the chance they took with us in bringing our story to the screen, and for the care they have taken.

“Our journey has all been by the grace of God and a promise to go on together, and we feel incredibly blessed to be able to share our story in this way.

“We hope that audiences will be left with a testament to the tough battle of life we all face and to the power of faith, hope, love – and never giving up.”

• Documentary The Murder of Rachel Nickell has been made to accompany the new drama about what happened that day, called The Witness. Both will be released on Netflix on June 4.

HARPER Beckham, 14, has channelled Victoria while borrowing her mum’s designer dress.

The only daughter of Spice Girls star Victoria mum and billionaire sportsman dad David Beckham, accompanied her parents on a recent trip to Ibiza.

The family were spotted soaking up the sunshine during a glamorous family getaway in Spain on Sunday.

In snaps of the famous family taken over the weekend, Victoria and David were seen with daughter Harper, son Romeo and his girlfriend Kim Turnball.

Victoria looked amazing in the photos, rocking a floaty chiffon brown dress, which was covered in a pretty floral print.

But now Harper has been spotted rocking the same exact frock after seemingly raiding her mum’s wardrobe and channelling her chic style.

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The teenager was seen out and about wearing the garment while smiling from ear-to-ear.

It is thought that the brown chiffon dress could be a new Victoria Beckham piece from the high-end designer fashion brand.

Harper paired the dress with a stunning £1,275 golden Bottega Veneta clutch bag and a pair of £680 Hermès Oran sandals.

This comes as Harper continues to be tipped to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a fashion and beauty entrepreneur.

Back in October last year, HIKU BY Harper, the proposed name for the skincare and beauty brand, was filed under two trademark applications by the business Victoria incorporated for Harper, H7B Limited, matching the teenager’s full name, Harper Seven Beckham.

A source told us at the time: “Harper loves fashion and make-up and has already started doing make-up tutorials. 

“The plan is to create a brand aimed at the younger market, taking inspiration for pop culture and Korean beauty.

“The Beckhams are incredibly encouraging parents when it comes to their kids’ talents and exploring their hobbies and business ideas.  They’re a very entrepreneurial family.”

Victoria previously said of her daughter: “Harper is going to be one of two things. 

“She’s either going to be a beauty mogul or she’s going to be a stand-up.

“She is hilarious.”

This comes after football legend and his wife Victoria were revealed to have amassed a fortune of £1.185billion, as per Sunday Times Rich List.

Sir David’s new eye-watering fortune puts him ahead of the King, whose wealth stands at just £680million.

The Beckhams’ skyrocketing ascent to 141st on the list comes thanks to business ventures including Victoria’s fashion brand and their lucrative production company, which was behind their hit Netflix documentary.

The power couple also have a number of commercial deals with the likes of Adidas, Pepsi, Armani, Coty, which made Beckham’s Instinct aftershave, and the Las Vegas Sands hotel group.

But the biggest increase in the Manchester United legend’s wealth was because of his US football club Inter Miami, which he created in 2018 and owns a 26 per cent stake of.

The hugely popular club is continuously growing thanks to its star players like Lionel Messi and fellow ex-Barcelona star Luis Suarez.