Ephraim Hardcastle

TORY MP Andrew Rosindell will do his prospects of getting a gong from the Queen no harm today when he tries to get a bank holiday approved to mark her Sapphire Jubilee. Unfortunately, it won’t go down too well with Chancellor Philip Hammond as he finalises tomorrow’s Budget. The 2012 Diamond Jubilee holiday cost the economy £1.2billion. Expect the Palace to issue a statement saying that the Queen wants ‘no fuss’ to spare the Government any embarrassment over its parsimony. PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s state visit has the Queen’s chefs fretting over menus for the Diet Coke aficionado who dines on chips, fried chicken and steaks. Chips have yet to appear on a state banquet menu. But HM’s kitchen is prepared. In 2011, Michelle Obama couldn’t sleep and ‘ordered up’ chips from the Buckingham Palace kitchen. She ate the lot. Michelle can thank the late Princess Diana, who persuaded the Queen to indulge William and Harry by allowing them, occasionally, onto the menu. MEANWHILE, Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner, 36, seems to have taken his eye off the ball over his father-in-law’s tweets accusing Barack Obama of phone tapping. Kushner, married to Donald’s daughter Ivanka, usually monitors the tweets but as an Orthodox Jew who strictly observes the Sabbath he was off duty on Saturday when Trump made his bizarre accusations. SINGER Patti Boulaye, 62, pictured, still carries a torch for exprime minister Sir John Major, 73. Asked to name her dream dinner guests, she tells The Lady magazine: ‘Jesus, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali and John Major.’ Surely Major, an under-the-radar boulevardier, would gallantly sit at the tap end when sharing a warm bath with glamorous Patti. DAVID Linley, the new Lord Snowdon, was criticised for selling, for £1.5million, Les Jolies Eaux, the Mustique house his mother Princess Margaret had gifted him. Linley and his multi-millionaire wife Serena invested the windfall in a £500,000 chateau in Provence, spending the balance on central heating, wiring plumbing and guttering. But house guests beware. One of the bedrooms contains Linley’s pride and joy, a rickety plywood desk he made as a student carpenter. A note warns: ‘Dear Guest, I would really appreciate that as this was the first piece of furniture I made aged 14 that you don’t put cold beers on the top – it leaves nasty ring marks. Thank you. David Linley.’ IS THERE form between Douglas Hogg, 72, now Lord Hailsham, and Lord Bell? Excitable Bell, 75, Margaret Thatcher’s former spin doctor, ranted against the House of Lords on Adam Boulton’s Sky News show yesterday. He described the chamber as ‘mostly a waste of time’ and criticised last week’s Brexit debate, adding: ‘The only person who fascinated me was Douglas Hogg, a rude pig of a man who pushed past me in a doorway and nearly knocked me over the other day and then started shouting (in his Brexit speech) about the moral high ground.’