Ephraim Hardcastle

aRTIST David hockney OM, 80, says he won’t marry his ‘faithful’ companion of 15 years, bearded, accordion-playing Frenchman Jean-Pierre Goncalves de lima, 52. Why so? ‘Marriage is about property,’ he says in an interview. ‘When you get divorced, you know it’s about property.’ hockney’s a Yorkshireman, once defined as ‘an aberdonian with the generosity drained out of him’. HENRY Blofeld, 77, bows out after 45 years of Test Match Special in the current England v West Indies tussle. Fortunately, he will continue to write and tour with his stage show. His BBC pay is said to be ‘meagre’, despite his enormous popularity and time on air. A source tells me: ‘Henry was often happy to tour the hospitality areas with organisers who’d ask him to visit a particular box or table. His traditional reply used to be, “Fifty quid?”’ Of course Blowers was jesting. MeGhaN Markle’s interview with Vanity Fair about her love for Prince harry – apparently on the understanding that the US celebrity magazine mentioned her TV show Suits – suggests that the canny 36-year-old actress will rival Sarah Ferguson when it comes to exploiting royal connections. Was Buckingham Palace consulted prior to her interview? They’ll neither comment nor give guidance on the matter. Which sounds to me like: ‘harry wanted her to do it and we couldn’t interfere.’ APROPOS the excitement over Meghan and Harry, the former is clearly more comfortable at playing the PR game than his previous girlfriend, bonny English actress Cressida Bonas, 28, pictured. She dated the prince between 2012 and 2014. To her credit, she never exploited their romance by giving an interview about it, far less signed up for a kiss-and-tell exclusive when it was over. NO doubt Prince Charles is delighted to hear that he is to have a third grandchild, even though it means the royal family will breach the ‘two children’ rule for the first time in almost 60 years. he’ll hope that no one will have the bad taste to recall his 2010, hour-long lecture at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, in which he bemoaned that ‘this poor planet of ours, which already struggles to sustain 6.8billion people, will somehow have to support over nine billion people within 50 years’. ONCE admired for its great writers, Vanity Fair let its prose deteriorate to accommodate the Meghan Markel interview, in which we are told: ‘It was raining in Toronto the day we met, and while this sounds corny, it also happens to be true: as Meghan resumed speaking about Prince Harry, the sun came out, ushering in a brilliant, warm day.’