Ephraim Hardcastle
HOME Secretary Amber Rudd lost her hat in a gust of wind on Horse Guards Parade while the Queen, the PM and Queen Letizia of Spain held onto theirs. Is this the Ms Rudd so adept in social matters that she was appointed ‘aristocracy co-ordinator’ for the film Four Weddings and a Funeral? (Writer Richard Curtis explained: ‘She knows a lot of dukes and earls.’) Ms Rudd arranged for posh friends to be paid £100 a day to mill around in ‘smart wedding outfits’ during film shoots. Yet she doesn’t appear to have heard of hatpins.
SHADOW Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry stood in for Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Questions and hobnobbed with the elite at the state banquet for King Felipe of Spain. Why wasn’t Labour’s portly deputy leader Tom Watson chosen? (Ed Miliband deployed his deputy, Harriet Harman, on such occasions.) ‘The Corbyn camp don’t like or trust Tom and besides he might have eaten all the banquet pies,’ suggests a Westminster source.
LADY Gabriella Windsor, 36, pictured, turned heads at the state banquet, which she attended with her mother, Princess Michael of Kent. ‘Members of the Spanish delegation who might otherwise have had to make do with talking to Nick Clegg, or Philip Hammond, were delighted Ella was deployed to charm them,’ reports my source. ‘She met them at drinks prior to the banquet and was seated with diplomats.’ Apparently, the Duke of York gave Ella ‘a few pointed looks’, perhaps wondering why his daughters didn’t get this chance to shine.
DIANA got one when she married Charles. So did Camilla two years after her marriage to the heir to the throne. Why hasn’t the Duchess of Cambridge received the Royal Family Order from the Queen? Amid the dazzling display of jewels and honours at the state banquet for King Felipe, Kate stood out as the only member of the family with no sash or badge to wear six years after her marriage to Prince William. One theory – that it’s because she’s a wife of AN heir to the throne, not THE heir to the throne – sounds too petty to be true.
THERESA MAY’s admission on Radio 5 Live that she shed a ‘little tear’ on hearing last month’s exit poll, is a coup for striking interviewer Emma Barnett, 32, who memorably skewered Jeremy Corbyn in the run-up to polling day. Highlighting the Labour leader’s ignorance over how he’d fund childcare pledges, she pointed out: ‘You don’t know it – you’re logging on to your iPad.’ She subsequently became a target for foul abuse from moronic Corbyn supporters.
WHY was Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley Johnson, 76, invited to promote his novel Kompromat on Radio 4’s Today show? He’s a Remainer, saying of his Russians-conspired-to-fixBrexit tome: ‘Kompromat explores the skulduggery that might just have gone on behind the scenes…’ Was his Today plug skulduggery behind the Radio 4 scenes?