James pushes the boat out with Pippa’s wedding gift
The fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, has written his first Doctor Who novel, Scratchman, reuniting the Time Lord with companion Sarah Jane Smith. Baker, 84, says: ‘I love the improbability of Doctor Who. Reason plays no part at all. As in religion, the overriding thing is faith. It may be improbable, but just believe in it and it’ll all come right.’ Baker’s tale of scarecrows terrorising a remote Scottish island might be too scary for the politically correct BBC tsars currently in charge of the series.
WHAT do you buy the woman who has everything? For the Duchess of Cambridge’s sister, Pippa Middleton, the answer is an antique wooden boat from the Thirties.
I can reveal that when the 35-year-old married hedge fund millionaire James Matthews last year, her brother James, 31, presented her with a vessel that he helped restore.
Craftsman George Winks, founder of Temper Studio, tells me: ‘James came to me with the boat and I
repaired the structure, but he restored the beautiful old engine himself. He has a real knack for that and he’s got a thing for old tractors.’ The boat is named Rafa, after the cocker spaniel James previously gave mother-of-one Pippa, and is now up in James Matthews’s Glen Affric family estate in Scotland.
‘They use it for messing about on the loch,’ adds Winks. ‘It was a bloody tough job, but I learned an awful lot.’
OLIVIA COLmAn, who will play the Queen in the next series of netflix’s The Crown, admits she couldn’t resist stealing from Buckingham Palace during a visit earlier this year. At a 200-person reception hosted by Prince William, she turned to her husband, screenwriter Ed Sinclair, and whispered: ‘Go get some loo roll.’ Dutifully, he found one of the palace’s 78 bathrooms and stuffed some into the pocket of his dinner jacket. ‘He got two squares of loo roll, just to say, “We got it from Buckingham Palace”,’ boasts Colman, 44.