Ephraim Hardcastle

THE engagement ring has, apparently, been purchased, the Queen has voiced no objection and Theresa May has assured HM that the Government has no qualms with Prince Harry marrying US actress Meghan Markle. Or so I am assured by courtier types. All very different from the last time (the 1930s) an American divorcee (Wallis Simpson) hooked a prince (Edward). LAST month, I suggested the engagement might be announced in Canada when Harry, as patron, attends the Invictus Games next weekend. With Meghan based in Toronto, where her TV series Suits is made, might Harry take on a Canada-based Commonwealth royal role after their marriage? LABOUR Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, whose campaign to seize power for Labour through ‘insurrection’ on the streets was exposed by the Mail, has long been considered a nasty piece of work by critics. He refused to apologise to Tory politician Esther McVey, pictured, after ‘joking’ about having her ‘lynched,’ and calling her ‘a stain on humanity’, excusing himself with: ‘Sometimes you just have to express honest anger.’ Ms McVey pointed out: ‘This is a man who links violence with politics.’ REMINISCING about his days as one of our first disc jockeys, Pete Murray, who will turn 92 next week, says: ‘You didn’t get much chance to meet the artists, but I knew Mick Jagger. We had something in common; we both liked cricket. One of the funniest things I ever saw was Mick sitting with Boris Karloff at The Oval – there they were, Frankenstein and his son!’ VICTORIA & Albert Museum chairman Nicholas Coleridge, 60, invited for lunch at fashionable Le Caprice by the Financial Times, boasted about the cherished corner table. ‘It used to have a very clear pecking order. The Princess of Wales had first call on it. Jeffrey Archer was second. Third was Leslie Waddington, the art dealer and fourth was me. Now I think there’s one person ahead of me on the list. It’s David Linley, now Lord Snowdon.’ Another world, isn’t it? HISTORIAN Max Arthur’s new pictorial biography of Winston Churchill reproduces a 1941 memo from his private secretary, ‘Jock’ Colville, warning that a gift of 2,400 Havana cigars from Cuba might be poisoned. MI5 boffins injected mice with cigar tobacco to ensure no ‘noxious substances’ had been added. Churchill had to wait five months for his first puff. NEWS of director Sir Peter Hall’s death at the age of 86 reminds admirers of a story involving the young Dame Diana Rigg, which I mentioned in 2015. As the star of Hall’s 1968 film of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she recalled the ‘incredibly cold’ shoot in Warwickshire. ‘I didn’t think I would ever hear a director saying this, but I had this little slip of a cotton dress on, and I bought some woolly knickers to wear underneath. I didn’t know it at the time, but the camera picked them up. I was up a tree and I heard Peter Hall say, “Diana, take your knickers off!” ’