Ephraim Hardcastle
WILL departing BBC director general Tony Hall be awarded the final accolade of an official portrait? His predecessor George Entwistle, out on his ear after just 54 days in 2012, wasn’t immortalised on canvas. But the previous DG Mark Thompson had £20,000 allocated for his painting. In these more straitened times, couldn’t the BBC have Tony’s moniker sponsored by Sky and Channel 4’s Portrait Artist of the Year?
TORONTO-based Barbara Amiel, alias Lady Black, warns Meghan Markle of the perils of life in uber PC Canada: ‘If the couple withdraw from royal privileges to the point of using Canada’s public lavatories, Meghan has the exciting prospect of mingling with gentlemen in the process of questioning, but not yet dispensing with, their dangling bits.’ Given Babs’ own much livelier past, it’s not something that would faze her, one guesses.
WILL British citizen baby Archie get an American passport? It seems Meghan and Harry just have to go to an American Embassy to formally sign a Consular Report of Birth Abroad of a Citizen of the USA. Watch this space.
COMMONWEALTH secretary general Baroness Scotland, pictured, played a pivotal role in the political career of Labour leader hopeful Sir Keir Starmer, appointing him DPP in 2008 when she was the party’s attorney general. Yet Starmer, playing down his millionaire status as he strives to replace Jezza, hasn’t been clamouring to tell Momentum about her patronage. Is it because of her unofficial title Baroness Shameless, earned for her eyebrow-raising extravagance in her current job?
JOHN Le Carre receives the £76,000 Olof Palme prize next week in honour of the assassinated Swedish prime minister. No danger of PM Boris honouring the thriller writer. He was foreign secretary during the period covered by Le Carre’s new novel Agent Running in the Field and is depicted as a ‘pig-ignorant foreign secretary’ and a ‘f****** Etonian narcissistic elitist without a decent conviction in his body bar his own advancement’. Don’t tell Boris the ending John!
PROFUMO protagonist Stephen Ward could have been saved from suicide by journalist Tom Mangold, who tells Radio Times he left him alone after being warned by his then wife that if he stayed out late he needn’t bother coming home. ‘I could easily have stopped his suicide,’ he says. ‘I could have cheered him out of his depression. Instead, I left, showering him with banalities. “Don’t do anything silly, Stephen…”’
JOHN Cleese offends his Irish fans by tweeting an inaccurate history tutorial: ‘After 1900 we made an agreement with the Bog-Trotters to split Ireland, and things quietened down.’ Fortuitously, the un-funny curmudgeon’s upcoming European tour doesn’t include Dublin.