Ephraim Hardcastle
WEDNESDAY’s finale to the grossly rude TV series The Windsors had the character Prince Andrew telling his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson: ‘You’ve got enough on me to sink a battleship.’ How absurd. Surely Andrew and the Royal Family generally ‘tolerate’ Fergie because of her lifeenhancing qualities.
AS if this wasn’t offensive enough, ‘ Donald Trump’ makes an appearance on the show, asking Camilla, pictured, if they might share a four-poster bed and ‘ go at it like baboons’ after peering at her cleavage and remarking: ‘What a rack!’ It’s far from being satire in the Oscar Wilde tradition.
HIS patrician style, upper-class accent, peculiar idioms of speech and unwillingness to compromise, as well as his passionate support for not always popular causes such as fox hunting – not to mention his double breasted handmade suits, his easiness with wealth and family history – have not helped Prince Charles’s public image. Strangely, though, they have made Jacob ReesMogg, 48, a hero to fellow Tory MPs who want him to become leader.
RE plummy voiced Jacob: interviewed yesterday by John Humphrys on Radio 4 about his Received Pronunciation accent he mused: ‘It just occurred to me that if I speak like my father and my children speak like me by the time they are 80 the accent will be 160 years older and may be incomprehensible to anyone outside the Rees Mogg family… I’d better moderate it a bit.’
EVELYN Waugh’s grandson, Alexander, recalls the curmudgeonly Brideshead Revisited author suing the Daily Express in 1957 for claiming that his lesser known brother Alec was a more successful author. Under oath Alec gamely conceded Evelyn was a much greater novelist. Evelyn got £5,000 in damages – £50,000 now. Recalls Alexander: ‘Alec, wearing a foulard scarf and a stripy blazer, left the court before the verdict was announced, cheerfully returning to his busy sex-life in Tangier.’
APROPOS royal-mocking TV shows, series two of Netflix’s The Crown has the Queen ‘crowning’ Philip when she finally got round to making him a prince in 1957. No such ceremony took place. There was simply an announcement in the London Gazette. How will they handle Charles becoming Prince of Wales in 1958? His coronet was far too big. The Queen confided to Noel Coward: ‘It extinguished him like a candle-snuffer.’
MY colleague Craig Brown, writing in the Oldie about the forthcoming 50th anniversary of the start of BBC Radio 1, reveals that the late John Peel so loathed fellow DJ Simon Bates that he and colleagues Kid Jensen and Paul Burnett ‘lurked’ in an underground car park to give him a hiding. Writes Brown: ‘Sadly he failed to appear.’