Ephraim Hardcastle
THE Queen’s new private secretary, grammar school alumnus Edward Young, 50, sealed his position while serving as deputy private secretary by organising HM’s mock arrival by parachute to join James Bond star Daniel Craig at the London Olympics opening ceremony. Organisers approached Princess Anne to speak to her mother but she told them: ‘Ask her yourself.’ London 2012 chief Sebastian Coe got his friend Young to approach the monarch, who agreed. Happily for all concerned, it was a public relations success.
ANGELA Merkel’s husband, Joachim Sauer, has long been a problem for the German chancellor’s spin doctors – a fact highlighted when they were both pictured looking miserable in holiday photos from Italy. According to a local source, chemistry professor Joachim, 68, insists ‘he has no intention of becoming a nice Mr Merkel in public’. Our own prime ministerial consort Philip May doesn’t have the entertainment value of the late Denis Thatcher but he cracks a smile from time to time.
EX-Kids Company chairman Alan Yentob, 70, who might be banned from holding company directorships, is described in Radio 4 news bulletins as a ‘former BBC executive’, leading some listeners to think he’s no longer with the BBC. Their news website adds to this impression by saying Yentob ‘was creative director at the BBC at the time of the charity’s collapse’. He’s still a highly paid BBC employee, collecting between £200,000 and £249,000 as presenter/editor of an arts show, Imagine. A recent contribution was an 80-second introduction to a film about the late gay icon and art photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
APROPOS Kids Company, disqualification proceedings are also underway against the so- called charity’s flamboyant creator, Camila Batmanghelidjh, 54, pictured. Should she be stripped of her CBE, awarded in 2013? The gong was an honorary one as she’s an Iranian. Otherwise, another of her right-on supporters, the then PM David Cameron, might have made her Baroness Batmanghelidjh.
CHANNEL 4’s Diana video – if they hold their nerve and broadcast it this weekend – is likely to embarrass Princes Charles and William. The former because of Diana’s indiscretions about his private sexual behaviour, the latter over his mother’s recorded allegation that Charles told her: ‘I refuse to be the only Prince of Wales who never had a mistress.’ Surely wife Kate will insist that honour now goes to William.
IRELAND’S Jewish Council defends Kevin Myers, the writer sacked by The Sunday Times, for suggesting that broadcasters Vanessa Feltz and Claudia Winkleman obtained high BBC salaries because they’re Jewish, saying ‘he is not an anti-Semite’ and it’s a ‘knee-jerk’ row. While 70-yearold Myers’s remark is indefensible, he’s admired for (among other things) campaigning for the recognition of Irish-born British soldiers in World War One who’d been cynically written out of official Irish history, most recently by the corrupt, Anglophobe late prime minister Charlie Haughey. They’re now commemorated at Passchendaele and other battlefields. Email: peter.mckay@dailymail.co.uk