Ephraim Hardcastle
HIGH-PROFILE political commentator Dan Hodges, son of ex Labour MP Glenda Jackson, writes: ‘Having spent five years rubbishing Tony Blair and all his works, Ed Miliband cannot suddenly turn around four weeks from polling day and say, “Look! My good friend Tony Blair is backing me!” ’ Doesn’t Hodges have a point? Miliband raised cheers at the 2011 Labour conference by pointing out: ‘I’m not Tony Blair.’ PROMOTING a new album, Ringo Starr, 74, says: ‘They all end up as sort of love songs to my wife’ – actress Barbara Bach, pictured, whom he married in 1981 after they met making the film comedy Caveman. First wife Maureen, by whom he had three children, died in 1994. Ringo says: ‘I’m having the good life where I am now.’ THE lyric for Don McLean’s 1971 hit, American Pie, is auctioned for £800,000. What’s it about? McLean has said, somewhat pretentiously: ‘Explaining it would be like T.S. Eliot trying to tell what The Waste Land means.’ Having heard Eliot recite his 1922 poem at Windsor Castle in the 1940s, the Queen Mother confided while in the company of historian A.N. Wilson: ‘At first the girls [Elizabeth and Margaret] got the giggles, then I did, then even the King [George VI].’ FERNANDO Peire, ex maitre d’ of The Ivy, says the old showbiz trough in Soho has had its share of dramas. Bill Murray left via the back door, a knotted handkerchief on his head and carrying a bag of rubbish, pretending to be a binman, to dodge photographers. Stephen Fry ‘scarpered’ rather than face playwright Simon Gray, after quitting the latter’s play, Cell Mates, following a panic attack. When the late theatrical agent Julian Belfrage stabbed his fork into the hand of an anti-smoking American who poured water on his cigar, ‘there was blood everywhere and women were screaming!’ adds M Peire. ABOUT to cover The Masters for the BBC, ‘voice of golf’ Peter Alliss, 84, tells Radio Times: ‘One of my dear, dear friends is Terry Wogan. And late at night, when we’ve had a drink or two, he always says – this is going to sound very arrogant – “we must never tell them how easy we find it”.’ I think we’d guessed that. SIR Mick Jagger is discussed by ex-Rolling Stones’ PR man, Keith Altham, who says in an April 10 BBC documentary: ‘Mick was explaining to me that “Charlie [Watts] doesn’t do interviews, Bill [Wyman] is boring, Keith [Richards] is out of it and Ronnie [Wood] does what I tell him. You talk to me…”. I thought, “We know where we are now – the Mick Jagger show!” ’ Altham concedes, though: ‘It needed someone to pull it all together, and he did.’ RESPONDING to a certain ex-premier’s reappearance, Respect MP George Galloway says: ‘Blair, dripping with blood, pockets stuffed with gold beyond dreams of avarice, comes out fighting for New Labour. Could anything be worse?’ Galloway’s no fan of Miliband. He called him ‘an unprincipled coward with the backbone of an amoeba’. Can’t say fairer than that!