Ephraim Hardcastle
HAS any recent Tory family benefited more from their political connections than the 3rd Viscount Hailsham’s, whose daughter, Bank of England deputy governor Charlotte Hogg, 46, is in trouble for failing to disclose that her brother, Quintin, worked for Barclays? Hailsham, 72, was given a life peerage in 2015 after 31 fairly undistinguished years as a Tory mP. (As a hereditary peer, he didn’t have a seat in the Lords.) Notoriously he had attracted ridicule after claiming £2,000 expenses for cleaning the moat at his 13th century Lincolnshire manor house. His wife, Sarah Hogg, 70, who ran John major’s policy unit, was elevated to the Lords as Baroness Hogg in 1995. Charlotte herself might have been offered a Lords perch prior to her current difficulties.
mY item about Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia making a state visit to London this summer is confirmed by the Palace. The Duchess of Cambridge will meet Letizia, a competitor in the royal glamour stakes and the first commoner queen in Spanish history. Kate will be Britain’s first official commoner queen in our history.
LORD Prescott, 78, says in his Sunday Mirror column that, after failing his 11-plus exam, ‘I left school with no qualifications except an A+ in resentment.’ Shouldn’t he instead marvel that, thanks to his trade union connections – and, of course, his natural, dazzling intelligence – he became a Labour MP for 38 years, a minister, a Deputy Prime Minister, a life peer and finally a prosperous elder statesman?
IS ex-royal butler Paul Burrell’s latest ‘disclosure’ – that his late employer, Diana, talks to him every night in his dreams – intended to persuade Netflix to include a dramatisation of this somewhat tasteless concept in its ongoing series, The Crown? And who’ll play Burrell if Netflix decides to include him? ‘Pinocchio,’ suggests a senior courtier.
ACTOR Paul Nicholas, who became famous in the 1970s starring in Jesus Christ Superstar, spoke fondly on Radio 4 about his late father, well-known London solicitor Oscar Beuselinck, who died in 1997 aged 77. Sardonic Beuselinck was something of a rough diamond. When, expecting sympathy, the late writer Keith Waterhouse confessed that a woman in his life had left him, Beuselinck observed: ‘You’ve p****d on the strawberries again.’