Ephraim Hardcastle
THIS column will have perched here for 21 years in January. This was what I was saying as 1997 dawned…
ECOLOGIST Teddy Goldsmith wagers £1,000 at 100 to 1 on his brother, the business tycoon and referendum Party chief sir Jimmy Goldsmith, snatching Tory David Mellor’s Putney seat in the election. Mellor tells me this doesn’t show much confidence in a win as ‘for the Goldsmiths, this is small change’. (Mellor beat him by 15,500 votes, but Labour took the seat)
SITTING with her legs crossed, a serious look on her face, Diana, Princess of Wales, questions Red Cross officials in Luanda about amputee victims of land mines in Angola. ‘Within the treatment, are you coping with psychological trauma?’ she inquires. (The kind of question her sons William and Harry might ask today.)
THE great critic Bernard Levin retires from The Times, an event unmourned by musical maestros Lord Lloyd-Webber and sir Tim rice. He said their hit song, Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina, was ‘inferior as a melody to the ones I as a boy used to hear improvised on a saxophone outside the Albert Hall by a busker with only three fingers on his left hand’.
NICOLE Kidman, pictured, bought the film rights to US novel In The Cut. Friends say she’ll never get it made as it is ’shockingly sexually explicit’. The plot: woman meets murder detective, has sado-masochistic affair, then begins to suspect he’s the killer. Kidman says: ‘It’s going to be very, very frightening.’ (It came out in 2003 to mixed reviews.)
COUTURIER Alexander McQueen is the toast of Paris with a show themed on Greek mythology. Previously he was a top-flight savile row tailor. ‘You’d have known that by the way his suit trousers fell on to his trainers,’ I was advised.
TOM Cruise wanted to rent a Chelsea house from the mother of Tory MP and spy writer Rupert Allason. The deal fell through when he said he planned to turn the basement into a gym. He was told that was out of the question. Rupert’s old toys were kept there, including a train set mounted on a special board.
SIR David Frost said on his breakfast TV show that a headline claiming cricketing star Imran Khan – former husband of Jemima Goldsmith – was a ‘child labour champion’ couldn’t possibly be true. unfortunately Khan confirmed the story, saying child labour was often ‘learning a craft’. Coincidentally sir David had been a guest at the Khan-Goldsmith wedding.
CARTOONIST Willie Rushton received generous obituaries following his death, but one in Private Eye – of which he was cofounder – is considered ‘rather thin’. I noted ‘the venom it directs outwards is often less poisonous than the bile exchanged among the satirists themselves’.