Ephraim Hardcastle
BAKE Off’s Paul Hollywood, 51, says he is ‘devastated’ after photographs emerged of him in a Nazi uniform at a 2003 fancy dress party, but Tory MP Nadine Dorries is unsympathetic, saying: ‘If he was an MP he would have to stand down immediately and there would be a byelection.’ Dorries’s Tory colleague Aidan Burley, 38, had to quit politics in 2015 after being caught enjoying a Nazithemed stag party with pals in France.
HAVING mentioned on August 4 that Prince Charles was the longest-serving Prince of Wales in history, my so-called Fleet Street rivals have just caught up – the heir to the throne might have had even longer in the job. The title goes to the monarch’s firstborn son and is usually conferred within a few months of his birth. Charles had to wait until he was nearly ten because the Queen wanted to put distance between him and the previous Prince of Wales, the dodgy, later-to-abdicate Edward VIII.
STRIKING SNP politician Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, 46, was offended when Sir Nicholas Soames, 69, heckled her with ‘woof woof’ in the Commons, describing the Tory MP’s behaviour as ‘disgusting’. What about her friend Alex Salmond ordering Tory MP Anna Soubry, 60, to ‘calm down woman!’ inquired Jo Coburn of the BBC’s Daily Politics. ‘That was a friendly exchange – Alex Salmond is a 100 per cent feminist,’ says Ms AhmedSheikh unconvincingly.
ANGELINA Jolie, pictured, who was at the Toronto International Film Festival for the premiere of her latest film, The Breadwinner, appeared on the red carpet accompanied by her six children – Maddox, 16, Pax, 13, Zahara, 12, Shiloh, 11, and twins Knox and Vivienne, nine. Separated from Brad Pitt, she says: ‘I am the breadwinner for the family.’ Isn’t Dame Angelina a class act?
WITH so many EU flags fluttering at the Last Night of the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, the Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo wore the medal of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire on his chest. Is he a Brexiteer?
STILL gyrating after 75 years in showbusiness, dancer Lionel Blair, who enters his 90th year in December, is about to unveil, on September 22, a blue plaque to his close friend, singing star Alma Cogan, at her childhood home at 29 Lansdowne Road, Worthing. Lionel was one of the last visitors to see Alma at London’s Middlesex Hospital, where she died from ovarian cancer in 1966 at the age of 34. He recalls: ‘Bruce Forsyth and I went together to see her and I was so shocked by her extreme loss of weight, and by the ravages her illness had inflicted, that I rushed out into the street and burst into tears.’