Ephraim Hardcastle
THERE’S unease at Clarence House that Camilla, who hopes one day to become Queen, will appear in season three of Netflix’s series The Crown. They’ll cover her days as Charles’s fun-loving girlfriend in the 1970s before marrying Guards officer Andrew Parker Bowles. Afterwards, a disconsolate Charles wrote to his great-uncle and mentor Lord Mountbatten: ‘I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually.’ If his sister, Princess Anne, had married Parker Bowles, whom she adored, the heir to the throne might have enjoyed a happier life. Might Parker Bowles’s Roman Catholicism have been an issue?
PRINCE William’s appearance, as president, at Bafta’s main movie awards ceremony means he can skip their TV shindig next month without causing undue offence. A lucky escape, not least because of Claire Foy’s nomination for her admired, if impertinent, impersonation of his grandmother the Queen in Netflix’s aforementioned The Crown.
THE Queen visits Leicester Cathedral today to distribute Royal Maundy money as well as make amends over not visiting the city in 2015 for the re-interment of her distant ancestor Richard III. It’s a delightfully antiquated ceremony. HM even carries a heavily spiced nosegay, supposedly symbolising the days when the poor were less scrupulous about personal hygiene.
HE’S 86 and frail, but Bahamas-based Sir Sean Connery, pictured in 1964’s Goldfinger, has hit another golfing hole-in-one – ‘his fifth or sixth’, says his film-maker son Jason, 54. The original movie James Bond says in his memoirs: ‘I began to see golf as a metaphor for living... its implicit codes of conduct have provided me with the nearest I have ever come to religion.’ Don’t tell the ‘Wee Free’ Church of Scotland elders in his native Caledonia!
CARLY Simon’s ex-husband, businessman James Hart, 71, attacks Sir Mick Jagger, 73, in a new memoir. Married to Ms Simon for 20 years until their divorce in 2007, Hart recalls going to a Rolling Stones concert when Jagger made a point of denying him a backstage pass while granting one to his wife, admitting: ‘I seethed throughout the entire concert, thinking how ridiculous Jagger looked strutting around the stage.’ Ms Simon admits a mutual attraction with Jagger, but says it remained unrequited, adding: ‘Having sex would have actually cooled things off.’
DONALD Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, currently in Moscow, would be happy meeting Russian president Vladimir Putin around a Boy Scout campfire. The 65-year-old retired Exxon chief executive, a former full-time Scout leader, is proudest of his title Eagle Scout awarded to him in 1965. He says: ‘All of the leadership training I got, I got in the Boy Scouts of America.’ Mr Putin must be trembling.