Madonna is at it again. At a gig this week in Paris to promote her latest album “Hard Candy”, the 49-year-old lip-kissed an unidentified woman on stage, drawing comparisons with her infamous snog with Britney Spears five years ago at the MTV Video Awards.

Some in the media were less than impressed. Britain’s Sun tabloid, the country’s top-selling daily, called the stunt “a bit old hat”. Rival newspaper the Daily Mirror ran the story under the headline “Desperately seeking attention” and opened its piece with the words: “Move on Madge!” Having said that, it should be pointed out that the publication nonetheless saw it fit to feature a large picture of the embrace on page 3.

Does the “Queen of Reinvention” need to reinvent again, or has she done it so many times that there’s nowhere new to go?

Madonna’s husband Guy Ritchie has given less-than-sympathetic British newspapers more fodder to have a dig. The 39-year-old film director gave a recent interview in which he remarked at how the super-wealthy had priced locals out of the housing market in London and that it was now almost impossible to pick up a pad in the centre of town for less than $20 million.

Now, unless Ritchie was being deliberately ironic, it should not take a genius to work out that the comments might be seen as somewhat hypocritical. News reports say that he and his super-rich wife own a $14 million house in Marylebone, central London, and a $12 million house next door, not to mention at least two non-domestic properties in London and a $20 million country estate. And that’s just in the UK.

“House prices don’t go down, they just go up,” Ritchie is quoted as saying in an interview with Empire magazine. “The natives of England are sort of being left behind because the big money came in and if it wanted something it bought it and made a bigger fortune doing so. And as anyone who has tried to buy a house in central London knows, it’s almost impossible to do so unless you have 10 million quid.”

On the annual Sunday Times Rich List, Madonna and Ritchie were estimated to be worth 300 million pounds, or around $600 million … in other words, enough for 30 more houses in central London.