Ephraim Hardcastle
QUEEN guitarist Brian May, 70, tells British Airways’ online magazine The Club why he loves flying BA. Could this be the same jumbocoiffured May who berated the airline for the revamp of its first-class cabin in June, whingeing: ‘It completely sucks!’ Looks like Brian ‘turn left at the door’ May has had his ego massaged by the BA bigwigs.
ACTRESS Frances Barber, 60, complains of last week’s Labour conference: ‘Everything was so clinically whitewashed... antiSemitism is rife but whitewashed.’ Now she’s quit the party, she adds: ‘I thought by hanging on I could change from within. I can’t. But I will be the one solitary figure NOT singing “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” before they drag me off to the gulag.’
LBC’s Nick Ferrari, about to give BBC2’s Newsnight a well-deserved kicking with an ITV rival, asked Chancellor Philip Hammond yesterday if he’d sent Theresa May a 61st birthday card on Sunday. Hammond: ‘I forgot.’ Ferrari: ‘Well, can you give her a late one?’ Hammond: ‘I will. I’ll make sure I do it.’
AFTER masterminding Six-Five Special, the BBC’s first pop show in 1957, Jack Good called Elvis Presley’s manager ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker to book the star. He said it would cost the equivalent of £65,000. Recalled Good, who has died aged 86: ‘That was merely the manager’s cut. The voice down the transatlantic line added: “Now regarding the fee for the boy himself…”’
WHITEHALL detects the hand of Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood (aka ‘Sir Cover-Up), 55, in two appointments: Antonia Romeo as permanent secretary at the Department for International Trade and former BBC chairman Rona ‘The Remoaner’ Fairhead as a minister at that department. Civil servants are in a dither, fearing they might mistake lookalikes Antonia, 42, pictured left, and Rona, 56, for one another. Women promoted under David Cameron were called Cameron’s Cuties. Heywood’s Hotties, anyone?
STILL learning at 82, Dame Judi Dench told students at New York’s Borough of Manhattan Community College: ‘I like to learn something new every day, including a new word – anatidaephobia, a natural fear of being stared at by a duck.’ One hopes she is not afflicted. A source says: ‘It can be a debilitating anxiety condition, wherein, no matter what one is doing or where one is in the world, one feels the constant presence of a duck or goose.’ Enough to put one off one’s duck a l’orange.
GREEK playboy Taki’s claim that Nick Tomalin was killed by a heat-seeking missile during the 1973 Yom Kippur War has been disputed by former BBC correspondent Michael Cole, who says: ‘I was on the Golan Heights the day Nicholas Tomalin was killed. The vehicle in which Tomalin was sitting was hit by a Syrian wire-guided missile dubbed a “suitcase missile”.’ Cole adds: ‘I am sure Taki was there, as he says, but I do not remember him.’ Over to you Taki.