Ephraim Hardcastle
HER daughters Malia, 16, and Sasha, 14, in tow, Michelle Obama, 51, heads off to Italy. Was London as special as she’d expected? Last time, the Queen gave her a guided tour of Buckingham Palace. A carriage, horses and liveried footmen conveyed the girls around the gardens. Now that Barack Obama has entered the twilight of his presidency, royal stardust is saved for the incoming president and first lady. There was an additional obstacle this year – Royal Ascot. ‘Nothing and no one gets between HMQ and Ascot,’ they say. The Obamas might have warranted a more extravagant royal reception if – as HMQ had expected – the President had come, fitting the Magna Carta ceremony into his schedule. But the US Secret Service might have had kittens over the First Family being carted around Surrey in open carriages.
FACING Hilary Benn, 61, standing in for Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman at the despatch box during Prime Minister’s Questions, First Secretary George Osborne, 44, the Prime Minister’s preferred successor, observed courteously that the former’s late father ‘would be extremely proud’. And a little regretful, too, perhaps. Benn senior never appeared at the despatch box for PMQs. The party’s lurch leftwards ended with the disastrously unsuccessful leadership of Michael Foot. Tony Benn nearly made it to become deputy, though. After standing against Denis Healey for the No 2 job in 1981, he lost by less than 1 per cent.
‘SIR’ Bob Geldof, 63, pictured, took part in a splendid evening of poetry and music at the London jazz club Nellie’s for the 150th anniversary of the birth of WB Yeats, reciting five poems via a video link. Why the groans when his face loomed on screen? ‘A little of Bob goes a long way,’ explains my source there. ‘Neither did he read the poems very well.’
TORY MP Andrea Jenkyns, 41, praised her predecessor, Labour’s Ed Balls, 48, for the grace with which he accepted her victory in his former Yorkshire constituency, Morley and Outwood. It was especially hard for him, perhaps, because he’d appeared earlier that night on TV doubting the veracity of an exit poll predicting his defeat. Unfortunately Ms Jenkyns spoils this redemptive tale by adding: ‘Back in February he called for an extension to paternity leave. The moral is we should be careful what we wish for.’ Gloating is never attractive, even when the victim is the abrasive Mr Balls. Who might not be doing much child-rearing, as it happens. He’s just taken a job as a research fellow at Harvard University in the US.
MILLIONAIRE BBC pensioner Alan Yentob’s BBC1 show Imagine will feature artist Jeff Koons’s erotic work Made In Heaven. Koons is seen nakedly canoodling with his now exwife, former porn star Ilona Staller. Yentob says of Koons, 60: ‘He put himself centre stage, he spared no blushes.’ So does Yentob, 68. There is quite a lot of him in the June 30 show. Mercifully he keeps his trousers on.