Ephraim Hardcastle

ITV’S Robert Peston won’t thank Squeaker Bercow for highlighting Erskine May’s parliamentary convention when torpedoing Theresa May’s Brexit. Embarrassingly, Pesto tweeted that Theresa’s husband Philip was the great-great-grandson of Erskine May. Alas, May died childless in 1886. Sheepishly Pesto later acknowledged: ‘I briefly forgot the only golden rule of journalism, which is that if it is too good to be true...’ PRINCESS Anne today celebrates the 90th anniversary of the Grand Order Of Lady Ratlings. Formed originally as the ladies’ section of entertainment charity the Grand Order Of Water Rats, Anne was elected a companion in 1975 and has been awarded the Ratlings Jesters Medal on more than one occasion for her earthy sense of humour. Who’d have thought?! THE Queen, not a fan of contemporary paintings, makes an official visit to art dealers Hauser & Wirth in Bruton, Somerset, next Thursday. Why? Company director Princess Eugenie should get a pat on the back for the ultimate accolade of getting granny to make a rare public appearance outside London. SURELY Victoria Beckham, pict u r e d , regrets asking husband David if he likes the way she dresses? ‘Why do you wear those jumpers with those big sleeves?’ he replied. ‘And why do you wear such baggy trousers?’ At least he didn’t ask the missus why she never smiles. FORMER Cabinet minister Esther McVey, 51, once described as the ‘love child of Norman Tebbit and Cilla Black’, happily confirms she and fellow Tory backbencher Philip Davies, 47, are an item. Ed Vaizey MP, 50, now happily married, was once hopelessly smitten with Esther to the point he would apparently propose every two weeks. Come on, Ed, give us a verse of Gladys Knight’s It Should Have Been Me. BAKE Off’s Prue Leith, 79, recalling her teenage obsession with horses, says: ‘I’d read about an English woman who’d married her dog because her dog was her everything – and I thought, that’s a really good idea, I want to marry a horse. When I told my father, he said, “You do realise all your children will be centaurs”. I thought, “There’s nothing wrong with that!” ’ ACTRESS Jane Seymour, 68, must have signed up for the BBC’s Celebrity Painting Challenge before she realised she would have to face the nude figure of boorish actor Keith Allen. As she set up, Allen appeared, stripped off his dressing gown and declared: ‘Honestly, this is big!’ THE mystery of why C.S. Lewis, who died in 1963, never wrote more Narnia books was solved by a letter-writer in The Times yesterday. Felicity Trotman revealed when she was 12 she wrote to the author asking if there were going to be further Chronicles, and he wrote back saying: ‘If we had ice cream all the time we’d find it dull or even make ourselves sick and turn against it completely.’