Ephraim Hardcastle
The Queen is delighted that Crossrail will become the elizabeth Line in 2018. her 25 years on the throne were marked by the Jubilee Line in 1979. But no airport has been named after her, an honour bagged by John F Kennedy, Indira Gandhi, Pierre Trudeau and Ronald Reagan, as well as John Lennon, John Wayne, Bob hope, Wolfgang Mozart, Franz Liszt and the Greek physician hippocrates. Perhaps they’ll rename heathrow one day.
LORD Sugar, 68, who says he’s supporting the UK remaining in the EU, sometimes displays questionable political judgment. After agreeing to accept the post of ‘enterprise tsar’ from Gordon Brown in 2009 – and subsequently a peerage – Sugar hailed the Scot as ‘one of the best prime ministers we’ve had in years’. Then he quit Labour, calling the party ‘anti-enterprise’. He’s good at bullying wet-behind-the-ears contestants on The Apprentice but – like some recently anointed peers – isn’t regarded as an adornment to the Upper House.
AL Alvarez has been talking about his friendship with fellow poet Sylvia Plath, pictured, who killed herself, aged 30, in 1963. As the wife of ‘controlling’ Ted hughes, who became Poet Laureate, her death is discussed endlessly in feminist circles. But an extract from her 1963 journal, quoted in the current New York Review of Books, makes her out to be rather flighty. She says she and Alvarez were in bed at his London home when the telephone rang. She says she put her foot over his manhood ‘so that he was appropriately attired to receive the call’. But Alvarez, now 86, tells me: ‘She made this up. Why, I don’t know. We were good friends but I never f****d her. ever.’
TORY MP Sir Nicholas Soames – Churchill’s grandson – trashes shadow defence minister Emily Thornberry for hiring Gordon’s Brown ex-aide Damian McBride, calling it the ‘latest example of rat returning to sinking ship’. Soames has also commented: ‘(Nigel) Farage and George Galloway... a bigger pair of rotters it would be hard to find.’ He finds Eurosceptic, Tory ex-Chancellor Nigel Lawson ‘deeply unconvincing’ and berates ITV’s political editor Robert Peston, ‘boring for Britain nightly’ – he advises the languid Londoner to ‘get a haircut, put on a tie and generally smarten up’. Shouldn’t Soames, 68, be offered a late-night TV slot?
Robert Sellers’s The Secret Life of ealing Studios tells a curious story about the popular comic Tommy Trinder, who died aged 80 in 1989. Novelist elizabeth Jane howard, then acting as a slave girl extra, met him in a dark studio corner. he wore a short toga, she said, adding: ‘he was doing a little dance, lifting his toga and muttering, “Now you see it, now you don’t”.’ The golden years of British cinema!
BOND girl Naomie Harris, 39, tells ITV’s Lorraine Kelly: ‘I’m filming with Will Smith at the moment and I’m completely in love with him.’ Will twice-married Smith’s steely wife of 19 years, actress Jada Pinkett Smith, 44, hear about Naomi’s gushings?