Ephraim Hardcastle
SURPRISINGLY, Tory junior minister Sir Alan Duncan is re-appointed as Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s deputy. Why continue to serve under a Foreign Secretary he doesn’t respect? A year ago, Duncan compared Johnson with Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, the trouser-dropping ex-PM and former cruise ship crooner. Times columnist Rachel Sylvester said on Tuesday that Johnson and Brexit Secretary David Davis were ‘declaring their loyalty while waiting to pounce’ on Theresa May. A Tory source says: ‘Rightly or wrongly, Duncan is suspected of being the source of this observation.’ A nest of rattlesnakes, isn’t it?
SALLY Bercow, pictured, was among spectators watching her husband John being returned as Speaker. Has Laboursupporting Mrs B, 47, had a change of heart? She has complained about having to live in the Speaker’s Westminster residence, moaning in a 2015 interview: ‘I’ve asked John for the last six years if we can leave. I hate it, I hate living in Parliament. It’s like living in a goldfish bowl.’ Does she now prefer it to obscurity?
NEW Environment Secretary Michael Gove is a fan of Radio 4’s The Archers, about the bucolic residents of fictional Ambridge. While Lord Chancellor, he was so moved by the plight of the heavily pregnant Helen Titchener, in custody after for stabbing her abusive partner, that he determined to improve the lot of women in her position. Currently, Ambridge’s farmers brood about the ailing dairy industry and the loss of EU subsidies. Is Brexiteer Gove taking it all in?
DUNDEE-born Hollywood star Brian Cox, 71, attracts useful publicity for a new film on Churchill by complaining in a Radio Times interview about England being obsessed by caste. But why didn’t such snobbery prevent him from seeking and acquiring membership of his men-only, bowing-and-scraping gentleman’s clubs, the Savile and the Garrick?
KATHY Lette, 58, keen as ever on disclosing intimate details of her life to Twitter followers, says comic Billy Connolly asked how she felt after having shoulder surgery. ‘Zonked, in pain, in bed,’ she said. He told her: ‘Just think how attractive you’d be to Bill Cosby!’ Will Connolly and his wife, Pamela Stephenson, appreciate Aussie-born Kathy making public his less-than-tasteful reference to the US entertainer currently accused of using drugs to assault women?
MOCKED for his absurd ‘chim-chim-cheree’ Cockney-isms in the film Mary Poppins more than 50 years ago, Dick Van Dyke, 91, says producers took no chances when hiring him for the upcoming sequel, the imaginatively titled Mary Poppins Returns, due out in 2018. Now playing a posh English banker – Mr Dawes Jr – Van Dyke confides: ‘They had a dialect coach practically handcuffed to me.’