Ephraim Hardcastle
THE Queen’s advisers will be feverishly perusing her 2017 diary after next Tuesday’s retirement of Richard Chartres, Bishop of London. They won’t want HM encountering his stand-in, Bishop of Willesden ‘Call Me Pete’ Broadbent. He’s in charge until January next year. In 2010 he was suspended for his rudeness to the royal family after calling the monarchy ‘corrupt and sexist’, accusing the Windsors of being ‘philanderers’ and referring to Prince Charles and Princess Diana as ‘Big Ears and the Porcelain Doll’. He has no chance of becoming the full-time Bishop of London but the CoE can’t dislodge him until January. APROPOS Bishop Broadbent: He also described William and Kate as ‘shallow celebrities’, predicting their marriage would fail within seven years. Appointed in 2001, he boycotted the Lambeth Conference in 2008 over the presence of an openly gay bishop. Couldn’t Chartres, a close friend of Charles – he received the KCVO from the Queen for his work at the Chapel Royal – have left someone a little less controversial running the shop? LORD Mountbatten’s daughter Lady Pamela Hicks, 87, admits that her mother Edwina (pictured), portrayed in the new film Viceroy’s House by Gillian Anderson, was a man-eater. But she never bedded India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. She insists: ‘Neither had time to indulge in a physical affair, and anyway the very public nature of their lives meant they were rarely alone.’ Unlike Edwina’s energetic lover Coldstream Guards Colonel Harold Phillips, known as ‘Bunny’. ED BALLS’S clodhopping efforts on Strictly Come Dancing earned him previously elusive popularity and now he is cashing in on the lucrative after-dinner speaking circuit. The ex-shadow chancellor, 49, who has been signed up by the Londonbased agency JLA, is generously ranked as an ‘A-grade’ speaker, which means he can earn as much as £25,000 for a single appearance. No wonder he’s in no hurry to go back into politics! URGING US President Donald Trump to calm down, Sir Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary from 1979 to 1990, says: ‘After only four weeks of his presidency, I have reached the solemn conclusion that I would have shot myself by now if I was employed as his press secretary.’ EXPECT some guff from Paul Burrell after the opening of a major Princess Diana frock event at Kensington Palace. When the Queen stepped in to save Burrell’s bacon in 2001 – after he was accused of stealing Diana’s possessions – he gushed: ‘The Queen has come through for me!’ Little good it did her, with roly-poly chancer Burrell, 58, disclosing on Through The Keyhole that Her Majesty ate bananas with a knife and fork.