Ephraim Hardcastle

DO the Queen and her Prime Minister hit it off? A nervous Margaret Thatcher required ‘a stiff drink’ after weekly audiences with the monarch. hM’s meetings with Theresa May are ‘business-like’ but I hear the Queen gets frustrated that the PM isn’t good at answering straight questions – indeed, is ‘sphinx-like’. My source elaborates: ‘The Queen thinks she’s supposed to be the sphinx-like one because she never leaks conversations.’ HIGH street shops are struggling but the Royal Collection is faring well – a wedding, a christening, a Queen’s 92nd birthday promotion, Charles’s 70th birthday range and now a birth. No sooner had Kate left hospital than the Collection launched the baby range – without waiting for the baby’s name. The items, including a £39 tankard and £49 plate, simply say, ‘Welcome to our new royal baby’, so they can be offered when Zara Tindall has her second child – and later if Meghan Markle adds to the royal brood. Meanwhile, a Teddy Bear with the name and date of birth of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s new son will go on sale at £125. Ker-ching! RACheL Weisz’s latest film, Disobedience – about a lesbian love affair – might upset Orthodox Jews. She plays Ronit, a photographer estranged from her rabbi father and persona non grata in their north London community because of a teenage love affair with a friend, esti, played by Rachel McAdams. Ms Weisz – now pregnant at 48 with her first child by husband (and James Bond star) Daniel Craig – said it was the first time she had kissed a woman on screen, pictured. ‘Less stubbly,’ she says. More shockingly, she spits in esti’s mouth. eek! PRINCE Charles’s campaign to have the Duchess of Cornwall accepted publicly as Queen Consort was assisted this week by ITV’s ultra-friendly documentary, The Real Camilla. No direct reference was made to her years as Charles’s maitresse-en-titre. Her biographer, Penny Junor, observed that ‘Camilla is not an adulteress by nature’, while her first husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, was damned as ‘a serial adulterer’. Is Clarence House’s public-softening-up campaign really necessary? As my royal source points out: ‘She’ll be Queen the moment Charles becomes King whatever.’ ROBeRT De Niro, 74, a hillary Clinton supporter, says there’s one film role he’d never play – Donald Trump. The actor calls the President ‘an idiot’ who lacks ‘any sense of humanity or compassion’. Does the scowling luvvie appreciate the irony? he made his name playing unsavoury mobsters in The Godfather Part II, Mean Streets and Goodfellas, as well as a vicious rapist-killer in Cape Fear. EVER since King George VI abolished the tradition in 1948, the Home Secretary is no longer required to attend royal births. Amber Rudd, 54, might have welcomed the task this week, though. She’s the first Home Secretary who is a mother to have a royal birth on her watch. Attending this royal birth might have got her out of the Windrush debate – and being quizzed yesterday about it by insufferably pious Labour pixie Yvette Cooper MP.