Ephraim Hardcastle

REPORTS that the Duchess of Cornwall’s helicopter nearly crashed twice last summer as she was flown home highlights Camilla’s preference for the solitude of her bolthole, Ray Mill in Wiltshire. She likes a whirlybird ride home if she has nothing in the diary the next day. But it’s expensive. Only trips of over £15,000 are itemised in royal accounts, with Camilla’s private lifts included in £2.7million worth of royal travel. Additional security costs are never identified but Ray Mill is protected around the clock so that Camilla can have a quiet night without a footman tidying-up after her. POWDER-puff poised for his last ever episode of This Week tomorrow, Andrew Neil has brought his beloved retriever from his French bolthole for the farewell, saying: ‘Molly the Dog is revisiting her old haunts in Hyde Park this morning, a little light exercise in preparation as star guest in final BBC1 This Week.’ Who’ll howl the loudest: Molly or Michael Portillo? WILL Foreign Office minister Sir Alan Duncan wait to be sacked or fall on his sword when Boris Johnson, as expected, becomes PM next week? Says an FO mole: ‘He’ll resign. He loathes Boris.’ JOANNA Lumley, pictured at the time, says she was so poorly paid for her role in The New Avengers in the 1970s that after starring as Purdey in 26 episodes she still had an overdraft. She recalls: ‘I was queueing in a bread shop in Crouch End when the woman behind me said, “Ooh, you look like that Joanna Lumley... I bet you wish you had her money!”’ DONALD Trump’s attack on Somaliaborn Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, urging her to go back home, begs comparison with First Lady Melania Trump. Ilhan became a US citizen, aged 17 in 2000, while Slovenia-born Melania didn’t gain citizenship until six years later, aged 36, a year after she married Trump. ASKED by Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis if he was a racist Rod Liddle, promoting his Brexit book The Great Betrayal, barks: ‘Well obviously not, but I’m used to going on BBC programmes and being accused of such things... Do you have to, at every possible juncture, show the BBC’s grotesque bias?’ Wasn’t Rod once editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme? COMIC Andy Hamilton tells Radio Times about the Chinese emperor who sought immortality by drinking lethal doses of mercury, adding: ‘And if you’re listening in the White House, Mr President, it definitely works.’ Andy hastily adds: ‘To be clear, I’m not advocating the poisoning of Donald Trump.’ A ROLEX watch worn by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now is to be auctioned in New York. Brando refused to take off the watch, a GMT-Master, during filming in the Cambodian jungle, telling director Francis Ford Coppola: ‘If they’re looking at my watch, then I’m not doing my job as an actor.’