Ephraim Hardcastle
THE Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s decision to send Prince George to Thomas’s school in Battersea has wrong footed the Royal Protection Command. Officers, anticipating George’s enrolment at William’s first school Wetherby, had completed comprehensive security checks and would have preferred the Notting Hill school for its proximity to Kensington Palace. Accompanying George to Battersea will entail a daily hour-long round trip. Kate, however, was determined to have her way. Whilst royals favour single-sex schooling she is co-educational through and through, remembering her unhappy time at single sex Downe House girls boarding school near Newbury. She moved to coeducational Marlborough after two terms.
IN the great Theresa May/Nicola Sturgeon Legs-It debate Dame Joan Collins, 83, pictured with fifth husband Percy, has come out firmly in favour saying: ‘Was I offended? Well, no. I actually giggled and then I showed it to Percy, and I said, “What do you think of these legs?” and he said, “Yours are better”.’ Good answer, Percy!
WHERE does the Queen stand on Nicola Sturgeon’s plan for a second Scottish independence referendum? Last time round Her Majesty, almost certainly a unionist, remained mostly silent. But in 2014 it was a win/win situation. If the nationalists had prevailed then HMQ would have gained a new throne as Queen of Scotland under Alex Salmond, a Royalist. However a republican-minded Sturgeon might not guarantee a future role for the Queen. Surely an opportunity for Mrs May to sign up the monarch and senior royals to publicly endorse the union?
HAS Philip Hammond forgotten Theresa May’s appeal to working class voters last year when she said: ‘If you’re at a state school, you’re less likely to reach the top professions than if you’re educated privately.’ The Chancellor has just given a talk to the lucky boys of £35,000-a-year Eton College. How many state schools has Phil addressed?
THE Princess Royal was unhappy with the vulgarity of Comic Relief long before Ofcom received 151 complaints after Friday’s BBC Red Nose Day show. Richard Curtis, founder of the charity told Radio 4’s Midweek yesterday that after the first fund raiser in 1988 he got it in the neck from the Queen’s daughter: ‘I remember Princess Anne telling me off for being blasphemous,’ he recalled.
PRO-EUROPEAN Edward Heath, PM when Britain joined the EEC, is surely spinning in his grave at the triggering of Article 50. Heath, who died in 2005 aged 89, lived next to Salisbury Cathedral where a former cleric mischievously suggests that Ted might have declared a day of fasting in protest at the EU exit. ‘But he didn’t like to forgo life’s little luxuries,’ he adds. ‘Coming down to breakfast one Christmas morning he looked decidedly unwell and asked about a stocking-full of goodies placed on his pillow. It turned out they were bath oil pearls. Unfortunately he had scoffed the lot.’