Ephraim Hardcastle
tHE Queen’s Christmas broadcast was recorded, unusually, not at Buckingham Palace, but at Windsor, located below the main flight path into Heathrow and blighted by noise. the Queen, known as One take Windsor, was, fortuitously, uninterrupted recording her annual bulletin. But HM is so attuned to the overhead din she can identify each passing aircraft by engine noise alone.
HER Majesty sent a signal of support for beleaguered Andrew’s daughter Beatrice with the Sandringham invitation to her fiance Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi. Her ‘close family only’ diktat has been breached just once before, when Harry’s then fiancee Meghan Markle was welcomed into the Norfolk fold. No forgiveness for Beatrice’s mum: Fergie’s still banned.
DAYs after tony Britton’s death aged 95, son and fellow actor Jasper says his dad’s treasured signet ring ‘went missing’ at Watford General Hospital tweeting: ‘It’s engraved with “tB” and drama masks. I’ll buy it back, no questions asked.’ Adding it was designed by his sculptor mother Eva, Jasper adds: ‘It’s a long shot, but it holds such value to the family. He wore it in everything he did. Unbearable loss.’
LADY Antonia Fraser, pictured in her prime, was taken to lunch with Nancy Astor at Cliveden, aged 15, with her dad Lord Longford. She recalls: ‘Lady Astor looked down the table and shouted, “You’re not as ugly as your father, you know...” Then her son David Astor, the nicest man in the world, spoke to me gently across the table, “She likes you, you see”.’ tHE late Lord Wyatt’s daughter Petronella tells the spectator about her mother’s dementia – and her asking for a baby grand and piano lessons at her care home. When Petsy remonstrates to her social worker about the cost, she replies: ‘But you must be one of the richest women in London. Isn’t your father Rupert Murdoch?’
CHARLES Moore was agitated when he spotted an eviscerated rat atop the 1934 Carlton Terrace grave of Giro, the dog of German envoy Leopold von Hoesch and believed to be the only pro-Nazi monument in Britain. Moore insists Giro, buried after biting an electric cable, wasn’t a Nazi. Neither, he says, was his master: ‘He was actually a creature of the Weimar Republic. He committed no known thought crime.’ Shouldn’t Charles get out more?
MARRIED to Michele for 46 years, Gyles Brandreth, 71, reports: ‘A friend asked me, “Do you have a spiritual side?” My wife chipped in, “Well, he’s younger than the Pope, just, older than the Archbishop, and he’s getting to look more like the Dalai Lama every day”.’ He adds: ‘so much for the season of goodwill...’
ROBERT De Niro, asked if he’d feel pride watching his past films, replies: ‘I have reasons that I look at my stuff and I’m not happy.’ Dirty Grandpa perhaps? Described by Rotten Tomatoes as: ‘Like a Werther’s Original dropped down a sewer drain.’