Ephraim Hardcastle
EARL Spencer discusses the ‘Art of Queenship’ at next month’s 13th Althorp Literary Festival in the family pile. He promises ‘an entertaining journey through the 2,000-year-old history of England’s queens, from Boadicea to 1952’. This suggests he’ll refrain from commenting on Elizabeth II’s reign. He is keen to live down his attack on the royals during the 1997 funeral service for his sister, Diana – and, more importantly, encourage £18.50-ahead visitors to Althorp. To that end, he’d like the Queen to make an appearance there next year when Princess Diana’s grave is unveiled after a multi-million-pound revamp. ‘HM’s presence is a possibility if William and Harry request it,’ says my source.
COMMONS Leader Chris Grayling notes that Angus MacNeil, one of the two SNP love cheats caught in the tartan ‘love triangle’, asked him about summer recess dates. Countryman MacNeil wanted to know because ‘he wanted to put the ram in with the ewes’. Grayling (pulling a face): ‘I thought he was talking about sheep!’
DONALD Trump’s coming visit to the UK, as a likely candidate for the US presidency, excites speculation. Will the Queen, at the behest of David Cameron, invite Trump to lunch, to make up for the PM recklessly describing the tycoon as ‘stupid’? He arrives in July, ostensibly to check on his Scottish golf course properties – one of which, in Aberdeen, is a short drive from Balmoral, summer schloss of the Queen.
ELIZABETH Hurley, 50, pictured, says she and her ex-fiance Shane Warne, 46, often played Rummikub – based on the card game gin rummy – before splitting in 2013, adding: ‘I was very slightly in the lead after our final face-off. Tee-hee.’ Warne is reportedly preoccupied with recovering the £ 41,000 sapphire engagement ring he bought for the still-shapely actress.
SHADOW Leader of the House Chris Bryant, an ex Anglican priest, criticises the Queen’s Speech, saying: ‘I love a bit of dressing up as much as any other defrocked vicar... but I did think it was a case of all fur coat and knickerbockers.’ Dressing up? Surely he means down. Sadly, he’s still known as Captain Underpants after his 2003 appearance on a gay dating website in his jumbo Y-fronts.
OUR brilliant astrologer Jonathan Cainer, who died on May 2 aged 58, departed this week in a purple coffin after 300 friends, family and colleagues gathered at York Maze to celebrate ‘ the brilliant – sometimes exasperating – man who could conjure, from thin air, elegant solutions to insurmountable problems’.
CHRISTOPHER Andersen’s new book on the Royal Family, Game of Crowns, says the Duchess of Cornwall’s unkind nickname for Prince Charles’s former secretary, bald-domed accountant Michael Peat, was ‘The Bidet’. She explained: ‘You know what it’s called but you don’t know what it’s for.’