Ephraim Hardcastle

FLAUNTING her spider brooch during her Supreme Court pronouncement, was Lady Hale channelling a song by pop ensemble The Who, about a doomed arachnid, sending a subliminal message to the PM? The lyrics conclude: ‘He’s come to a sticky end/ Don’t think he will ever mend/ Never more will he crawl round/ He’s embedded in the ground.’ And the title of the track? Boris the Spider! MORE than 50 years after Joan Bakewell’s first TV appearance prompted humourist Frank Muir to dub her ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’ she has been dropped by the BBC. Baroness Bakewell is furious that her Radio 4 series We Need To Talk About Death has been cancelled. Dealing with such essential subjects as the preparation of a body for burial at sea, it ran for a total of nine episodes over three series. ‘Sorry folks,’ tweets Joan forlornly. ‘It won’t be back. So you’ll have to find things out for yourselves.’ Particularly if you take a turn on a cross-Channel ferry… DEMI Moore, pictured, apologises to actor Jon Cryer for taking his virginity while making their 1984 film No Small Affair. No you didn’t, responds Cryer, saying: ‘I had actually lost it in high school.’ He could have added former prime minister Clement Attlee’s wisdom: ‘A period of silence on your part would be welcome.’ STUNG by Squeaker Bercow’s criticism of his ‘perambulations’ at the dispatch box, Attorney General Geoffrey Cox mewls: ‘I wonder, Mr Speaker, in a wellearned retirement, if you’d like to give lessons to frontbenchers? It could be the beginning of a new, glorious… or even more glorious career.’ Email: john.mcentee@dailymail.co.uk SHADOW Attorney General Shami Chakrabarti shoots herself in the foot gloating over Boris Johnson’s court humiliation on Channel 4 News, saying: ‘These posh boys learn at school, when you lose at cricket you say “fair play”.’ Could one of those privileged lads be her own son at £7,000a-term Dulwich College?