EVERYBODY loves a wedding. It’s good for the circulation. But when four come along at once it puts the paparazzi into a dizzy tizz.

Security guards with walkie-talkies virtually outnumbered guests yesterday as Britain’s magazine world fought over the crumbs from a veritable feast of wedding receptions.

OK! and Hello!, the celebrity magazines, had pulled out their chequebooks, the former paying a record £1.75m for the rights to the nuptials of Jordan, the glamour model, and Peter Andre, the pop singer, at their idea of a fairy castle in Berkshire.

Vulgarity was kept well at bay 25 miles away in the village of Rotherfield Greys, near Henley-on-Thames, when Tom Parker Bowles, 31, son of the Duchess of Cornwall and food editor of Tatler, married Sara Buys, 32, a fashion writer for Harpers & Queen. The guest list included the Prince of Wales and his own bride, Prince William and Prince Harry.

Would the curse of OK! doom the Jordan ceremony? Several star couples have split up after professing their undying love in the magazine — circulation 532,000 — and its use of a photograph of Anthea Turner plugging a chocolate bar at her wedding effectively ended her career as a television presenter.

So many invited guests, including Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and Lady Isabella Hervey, declined yesterday that Jordan threatened to put cardboard cut-outs of them in the pews.

The money paid for the ceremony — more than £3 for every reader — dwarfed the £1m paid for the weddings of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones and the Beckhams. But having seen who turned up, Richard Desmond, the chairman of Northern & Shell, OK!’s publisher, may now regard it as a poor investment. The wedding will mean nothing to the readers of a newly launched American version of the magazine.

The presence of Kerry Katona, the former Atomic Kitten singer, Dean Gaffney, who played a road sweeper in EastEnders, Paul Gascoigne, Vanessa Feltz and Sarah Harding, from the reality TV pop group Girls Aloud, downgraded it to a D-list wedding.

Jordan, 27, who has dared to criticise the wedding of David and Victoria Beckham as “pathetic”, had said she wanted a Disney-like wedding. She and Andre, 32, who met while appearing together in I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here, already have a three-month-old son, Junior.

The model, who signed the register under her real name of Katie Price, tried to get even more editorial coverage than the 40 pages OK! will devote to the ceremony at Highclere Castle. She wore a train on her wedding dress 2,000ft long in an attempt to get into the Guinness Book Of Records.

But the wedding descended into comedy when police judged that the Cinderella-style coach pulled by miniature ponies in which Jordan “arrived” at the wedding — having spent the night at the castle anyway — was unroadworthy.

A team of former SAS soldiers was hired to make sure no cameras were smuggled into the ceremony. As befitted a wedding so heavy with security men, Jordan walked down the aisle to Whitney Houston’s I Have Nothing, from the soundtrack of The Bodyguard.

A catty suggestion from Hello! that the wedding cake “would be an exact replica of Jordan’s breasts, made to a special recipe to ensure it won’t sag in the middle”, was denied. Jordan’s spokeswoman insisted: “The do wasn’t tacky.”

Hello! magazine — circulation 392,000 — which famously smuggled grainy photographs out of OK!’s £1m buy-up of the wedding of Douglas and Zeta-Jones, settled for a “rival” attraction yesterday: the London wedding of the former new Labour apparatchik turned psychotherapist Derek “Dolly” Draper, 36, to Kate Garraway, 37, a morning television presenter.

Draper, who is much more at home with the pages of the Red Paper or Progress magazine, is a former aide to Peter Mandelson. Garraway said they had agreed to take Hello!’s shilling after realising “the size of the bar bill”.

There was no need for cash offers in West Sussex, however, when Jodie Kidd, 26, the supermodel, married Aidan Butler, 28, a dotcom millionaire.

It was far more genteel at the traditional “top hat and tails” Parker Bowles wedding. Geordie Greig, editor of Tatler and a guest at the ceremony, said: “We may ask the happy couple if they would like us to use their pictures and we would be delighted to do so. But we haven’t asked yet.”

The bride kept the royal guests and her groom waiting for 21 minutes when it is believed she switched from an open carriage to a Bentley when it started to rain. On her arrival at church many of the ushers, including Zac Goldsmith, adjourned to the local pub rather than attend the service, and to keep the wedding on schedule, the rector cancelled his sermon.

At the reception at the home of the Buys family champagne and oysters were served on arrival, and the main course was a shepherd’s pie made to a recipe by Tom Parker Bowles.

So many celebrity weddings on one day is rare but this weekend is a popular date. Wedding planners said the second Saturday in September is the second most popular in the calendar after Easter because most people are guaranteed to be back from their summer holidays.

Even so, a poll on Sky News showed that 61% of the public would rather go to Jordan’s wedding than see the royals.

Additional reporting:
Ben Dowell and Christopher Morgan