Here's a really good article by Andrew Bolt regarding celebrity hypocrisy. It is a good reminder not to take what people do on face-value and to always check your own intentions.

The Wrong Kind of Hypocrites

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun

"Hypocrisy is a virtue, which is why I’m so down on amateurs like “Sir” Bob Geldof, who give it a bad name.

If only Geldof could learn the art from David Campbell, the family man MP caught last week leaving the gay bathhouse Ken’s of Kensington.

Bob, the key to being a virtuous hypocrite like Campbell is to at least conceal, as best you can, the gap between what you preach and do.

And ‘fess up when you’re found out. Pay tribute to the standards from which you’ve secretly excused yourself.

But see how Geldof, the world famous champion of the starving, last week fluffed his act.

He flew into Melbourne to give his usual speech about helping the needy, which in his case apparently includes former Boomtown Rats stars.

His sermon to a fundraiser for a specialist cancer unit at St Vincent’s reputedly cost the organisers - the Pratt Foundation and social-page regular Heloise Waislitz - many tens of thousands of dollars.

But so far, so discreet, since Geldof’s manager refused to reveal the size of his cheque or even discuss the ethics of charging big for a cancer charity do.

Indeed, this pay-to-preach thing promised to be a whole lot more discreet than Geldof’s visit two years ago, when organisers, including the Brumby Government’s Education Department, did a noisy tin-rattle for the reported $100,000 it took to pay the Irishman to tell them they should help other needy foreigners, too. Only not Irish millionaires, this time, but people actually starving somewhere in Africa.

So it all was going swimmingly at Waislitz’s Toorak mansion, with everyone getting what they wanted: Geldof his cheque, the $1000-a-head crowd a sense of moral purpose, and St Vincent’s $350,000 to cure the sick.

To crown her triumph, Waislitz, daughter of the late cardboard billionaire Dick Pratt, even got to sing to Geldof from her own stage.

But once again Geldof couldn’t help but lift the lovely skirts to show a little too much ugly leg.

His visit would have attracted almost no attention outside the Toorak celebrity circuit had he not decided to take himself altogether too seriously for a paid entertainer. He’d contracted to speak for an hour, and it was made clear there was no way he’d let the waiters distract him and his audience by serving dinner mid-hector.

And, of course, the audience, having paid top dollar for their pleasure, could not possibly be expected to eat the salmon dish that was consequently spoiled by the delay. Such a dish might be fine for Africans, but ...

One of the guests, Crown casino publicity queen Ann Peacock, felt obliged to whistle up another 150 serves from the Crown kitchens.

See the classic mistake here that turned a virtuous hypocrisy into the kind that curdles? A night that should have had an air of noble self-sacrifice became instead a gaudy symbol of let-them-eat-salmon excess.

Yet Geldof didn’t take the booby prize last week for sub-standard hypocrisy.

No, that went to actor Jeremy Irons, who announced he’d become a green crusader, and would make a film about sustainability to urge us to “scrap our effluent junk” and live less decadently.

“How many clothes do people need?” he stormed. We all consumed too much and “people must drop their standard of living (so) the wealth can be spread about”.

All this bracing advice was imparted in a Sunday Times article, which included this fateful line: "Irons, who owns seven houses, including a pink castle ..."

You see how the effect is instantly spoiled. If Irons must tell us all to live more austerely, he should at least make sure his castle is not pink.

Pink makes it stand out too much, and leaves us asking why Nirvana means castles for the actor, but mud huts for us.

Irons’ failure to even try to hide this gap between word and deed by, say, painting his castle camouflage green instead, highlights a peculiarly common failing among today’s celebrity preachers of poverty, who have done so much to discredit hypocrisy.

How many examples do you want?

There’s Al Gore, the global warming billionaire, who says we must save the world by leaving a smaller footprint, yet has just bought his fourth big house.

There’s Heather Mills, the richly divorced wife of Sir Paul McCartney, who urges us to save the planet by “drinking rats’ milk and dogs’ milk”, but then roars off from her press conference in a luxury four-wheel drive.

There’s Google co-founder Larry Page, who finances an eco-group working for a “clean energy future”, but then buys himself a private Boeing 767-200.

There’s Virgin boss Sir Richard Brazen, who says we must cut our emissions, but then drops in to Brisbane in a private chopper to flog his new business - joy rides into outer space.

There’s supermodel Gisele Bundchen, who no sooner accepts a job as the United Nations’ environmental ambassador than she orders herself a new 20,000sq ft home with a six-car garage, lagoon and lift.

And there’s John Kerry, the US Democrat senator who ran for president and co-wrote with his billionaire wife This Moment on Earth, suggesting ways “you can develop a sustainable way by which to live”.

But here’s that same Kerry, owner of five luxurious mansions, describing his own “sustainable” mode of transport to the Detroit News: “Well, we have a couple of Chrysler mini-vans ... We have a Jeep, and a PT Cruiser up in Boston, and we have some SUVs, and an old Dodge 600 that I keep in the Senate.”

Again you can see the real problem with this sloppy kind of hypocrisy. None of these hypocrites even pretend to live by the ideals they preach.

Mills has not once skolled a glass of rats’ milk in public, even if only to retch in private. Bundchen refuses to at least build her palace from mud bricks.

Not one of these bungling hypocrites understands what’s demanded of them by Francois de La Rochefoucauld’s famous maxim: “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.”

The homage is necessary! The bended knee. The pretence of doing as is sternly preached, and complete secrecy while doing the happy opposite.

That is why it’s actually David Campbell who’s a better moral exemplar of our saintless times.

Campbell is the now-resigned NSW roads minister who married too young and had two children before, apparently, discovering he was actually gay - or at least bisexual.

He nevertheless continued, at least publicly, to honour his marriage vows and to pose before voters as a good family man and a pillar of this essentially conservative society.

This was the public homage he paid to our domestic virtues, while in the strictest privacy he ducked out to gay bathhouses offering all-towels-off communal fun.

To the casual observer there was no hypocrisy to see, which is what gives hypocrisy its one social virtue.

And, of course, once everyone finally saw this month that the emperor had no clothes, at least not at Ken’s of Kensington, Campbell with great dignity announced he knew the game was up and quit his job to devote himself to apologising.

That is class. That is hypocrisy I can at least respect.

You see, none of us are saints and all fall from the higher standards we invariably demand of others with more energy than we do of ourselves.

But what can we do?

Do we tell our impressionable children that Dad sometimes does a Tony Abbott and stretches a truth in the heat of an argument: “No, I did NOT eat that third slice you were saving.”

“No, I did NOT water my garden on an even-numbered day.”

No, no, no. If we all confessed to our every sin, our children would lose all faith in the moral standards we preach, or lose all hope that they can be lived by.

Rather hypocrisy than despair and anarchy. But for heaven’s sake, sssshhh. And eat your damn salmon."