Ephraim Hardcastle

MEDIA mogul Rupert Murdoch is caricatured viciously on the BBC’s Tracey Ullman Show. In a recent episode he invites his wife, Jerry Hall, to share his popcorn, which is strewn on his lap. He complains: ‘Can’t a man hide his pecker in his popcorn without getting grief about it?’ Murdoch and Miss Ullman are not friends. She lost a multi-milliondollar lawsuit against his 20th Century Fox in 1992 when she sought an increased share of profits from The Simpsons, which began as a five-minute segment on her US show. LABOUR peeress Shami Chakrabarti’s feeble excuses for Labour’s catastrophic defeat in the Copeland by-election included the observation that the Cumbrian constituency ‘is remote from London’. She also told the BBC’s Andrew Marr: ‘There’s the nuclear industry and people have done very well out of that industry, and then there’s the people left behind… you have to cherish them.’ Lady Chakrabarti lives in London, where she’s done very well and is cherished in the professional protest sector. WARREN Beatty’s part in the Oscars mishap is attributed by some to his age, 79. However it was co-presenter Faye Dunaway, 76, who read out that La La Land had won, when it should have been Moonlight. Beatty had been given the wrong envelope and passed it to her. ‘She was stunned, completely speechless,’ says Radio 4’s Martha Kearney, who was present. Although they were lovers in their biggest film –Bonnie And Clyde, 50 years ago – Beatty objected to the then unknown Miss Dunaway, pictured, portraying reallife gangster’s moll Bonnie Parker, sharing top billing with himself. THE Duchess of Cornwall’s decision to back a series of street parties and picnics in June to honour the memory of murdered Labour MP Jo Cox could prove controversial. Royals usually avoid events which have a political character. President Donald Trump is due to visit our shores in June. It would be seen as unfortunate if some of those taking part in the Cox tribute use the occasion to protest Trump’s meeting with the Queen. THE BBC’s adaptation of Len Deighton’s book, SS-GB, about a German invasion, has King George VI under guard in St George’s Hospital in Hyde Park Corner. In the book, his children, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, are hiding in New Zealand. This fictional theory is undercut by a letter their mother Queen Elizabeth – the Queen Mother, as she was later styled – wrote to her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, saying: ‘The children will not leave unless I do. I shall not leave unless their father does, and the king will not leave the country in any circumstances, whatever.’ RE SS-GB, how will it deal with Edward VIII, who abdicated to marry American double divorcee Wallis Simpson? He reputedly taught Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret how to do a Nazi salute. Author Deighton worked on a 1995 documentary, Edward VIII: The Traitor King, which revealed the latter would have been enthroned by the Germans if Britain had lost the war.