Ephraim Hardcastle
PRINCE Charles will heave a sigh of relief when William and Harry visit the Princess Diana garden at Kensington Palace tomorrow, marking the end of the protracted 20th-anniversary homage. Charles took a different approach this year to remembering Diana. In 1997 he played the role of grieving exhusband flying to France to collect her body and walking behind her coffin at the funeral. Ten years later he was in the front row at a service in the Guards’ Chapel (although he crassly insisted Camilla be at his side until the Queen intervened). This time he’s hid away at Balmoral. Does he regret that strategy?
APROPOS Charles. Project QC – his mission to have Camilla crowned as Queen – is in virtual tatters, with negative opinion polls revealing hostility towards that ambition. In fact, public antagonism is worse than ten years ago. Is this because his boys have become media stars talking about their mother while he and the rest of the royals remain silent – and invisible?
THE 11th Duke of Beaufort was laid to rest on Friday, an event that would once have demanded a full royal turnout. Beauforts were once on first-name terms with monarchs and sheltered Queen Mary during the war. The Queen cut her links with the family some years ago. At least Charles and Camilla turned up for the funeral of their Gloucestershire neighbour, known as The Master, whose Beaufort hunt they supported regularly. Princess Anne, a fellow Beaufort hunter and neighbour, wasn’t present. She sent former squeeze Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles instead. The cuckolded former hubby sat stoically beside his ex and her husband Prince Charles.
LOUIS Walsh and Sharon Osbourne express regret in Radio Times about the huge career dip suffered by Leona Lewis, pictured, since winning ITV’s The X Factor in 2006. Louis: ‘I think Leona Lewis has lost her way since, but that’s not our fault.’ Sharon: ‘She works! I see her in LA.’ Louis: ‘In the shops?’ Hilarious? I think not, Louis.
DIRECTOR Doug Liman, 52, who shared a house in Georgia with Tom Cruise, 55, filming American Made, tells ShortList magazine the star was obsessive, adding: ‘Too neat. Tom kept messaging: “The dishes aren’t clean. The pots aren’t clean.” I’d clean stuff and put it away. He’d pull it out, hold it up, and say, “That’s not clean.”’ Scientology with an apron?
FORMER Labour home secretary turned author Alan Johnson tells the New Statesman he’d like to have been a teacher, adding: ‘I became a postman instead, which at least made me a man of letters.’
SIR Richard Branson, 67, gushed last night on Sky News about his friendship with Princess Diana. At least he didn’t take the credit for Elton John’s funeral tribute Candle in the Wind. The Virgin boss has previously bragged that it was he who came up with the idea for Elton’s Westminster Abbey caterwauling, ‘getting the archbishop to accept it into the funeral service’. Old Beardie can’t help himself, can he?