Ephraim Hardcastle
ALAN Yentob, 70, managed to have his BBC salary exempted from the published list of presenters paid more than £150,000. Why? His vanity arts series Imagine is produced by BBC Studios, a subsidiary of the BBC exempt from public scrutiny. The Armanitrousered one is paid more than Theresa May (£150,000), even if, via an anomaly, the public is prevented from knowing that.
THE failure to include Camilla in the new version of the state prayer prompts speculation that the Queen still doesn’t quite approve of her son’s wife. Not so. She is a stickler for formality. Camilla is actually the Princess of Wales and that is the proper form for the prayer. The Queen’s Windsor chaplain Willie Booth added Camilla’s name as Duchess of Cornwall to their wedding prayers but earned a rebuke from the Queen. HM wants the proper wording, the Prince and Princess of Wales.
TORY toadie Sir Desmond Swayne, 60, knighted last year for being David Cameron’s former bag-carrier, lavishes praise on Speaker John Bercow, gushing in the Commons that he brings ‘huge advantage to the House’. Hailing the ‘wisdom of the current Speaker’, Swayne adds in cringeworthy fashion: ‘Long may he remain in the chair!’ Self-absorbed Bercow, who recently decided to break his pledge to stand down as Speaker next year – he now hopes to go on until at least 2022 – jovially responds: ‘I’m going to get very emotional in a moment. We are grateful to the right honourable gentleman.’ Pass the sick bag.
CHRIS Tarrant’s £20million fortune was much diminished after his 2007 divorce from wife Ingrid, and on Monday the blokeish Who Wants to be a Millionaire? host, pictured, chose to fly with budget airline EasyJet. He was miserable when his Gatwick-bound flight from Crete was diverted to Stansted and, along with other furious passengers, he was asked to raise his hand on whether he should wait three hours to fly to Gatwick or disembark at Stansted. Chris, 70, voted to get off. He didn’t even phone a friend.
OSCAR-winning actor Mark Rylance, 57, tells Time Out he accepted a knighthood this year to validate his daft beliefs on crop circles and Shakespeare (he believes the bard didn’t write the plays). ‘They say I’m insane or not mentally stable,’ he admits. ‘A knighthood makes it a little less easy to write me off. Then I immediately thought of Jimmy Savile: he was a knight, so that blows that theory.’
EX-Labour MP George Galloway, 62, protests: ‘How can Blair still be in the party whilst I, expelled over the Iraq war, remain expelled?’ Tory backbencher Michael Fabricant, 67, suggests cheekily on Twitter: ‘Probably because (Blair) won Labour three general elections in succession.’ Galloway then brings up the subject of Fabricant’s thick, blond hairdo, sniping: ‘A Tory MP who thinks we don’t know it’s a wig…’
WILL there be a Janice Bond now we have a female Doctor Who? No, says exJames Bond Pierce Brosnan, 64, adding: ‘There’s no reason why you cannot have a black James Bond but a female James Bond? No, James Bond’s a guy, all male.’ Is Brosnan a voice in the wilderness now?