Ephraim Hardcastle
ONE of Lord Bath’s earliest wifelets was Shirley Conran. In the Seventies, after splitting from Terence, the Superwoman author had to endure Alexander Thynne’s spurious pillow talk that she would eventually be Lady Weymouth. This prompted her son, fashion designer Jasper, then aged ten, to ask: ‘If Mummy marries Alexander, will that make me a lord?’
THE Queen made history on Friday by holding her first video-link Privy Council meeting with Jacob Rees-Mogg, Robert Buckland and Michael Gove. Normally meetings are held standing. The trio were allowed to sit down at their laptops.
PRINCE Charles appeared to give his book Harmony a plug during his videolink opening of the Nightingale Hospital, propping his laptop on the 2010 tome. It is currently out of print and Charles might be hoping for a republication, but it must be galling for HRH that the most successful royal author remains Sarah Ferguson and her literary masterpiece Budgie The Little Helicopter.
THE new Lady Bath, Anglo-Nigerian Emma, pictured, isn’t Britain’s first marchioness of colour. That distinction goes to Bombayborn Bapsy, Marchioness of Winchester (1902-95), who married the bankrupt marquess when he was 90 only to be dumped within weeks – he went back to his former squeeze, Ian Fleming’s mother Evelyn. She was either hated or ignored and when she died she left a fortune to Winchester to build a park in her name. They didn’t.
BORIS isn’t the first prime minister to try to run the country from a hospital bed. Clement Attlee held Cabinet meetings from his cot in the Lindo Wing in 1951. He was an NHS patient given a room so he could hold government meetings in private.
MARGARET Thatcher’s Cabinet constantly wondered why dry-as-dust Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong, who has died aged 93, rubbed along so well with Baroness Janet Young. His obituary reveals all. He and sporty Young packed down in the scrum together when they played rugby at Oxford’s Dragon prep school in the 1930s.
SEVENTY-five years after his father Richard’s famous BBC broadcast from Belsen, Jonathan Dimbleby, revisiting the concentration camp for tonight’s TV retrospective, wishes he’d asked his dad about it: ‘He never said a word to me. I now know about his feelings through his famous broadcast, which I only heard after he had died. It brought me to tears then, as it still does today.’
MATTHEW Macfadyen, playing Who Wants To Be A Millionaire cheat Charles Ingram in ITV’s Quiz, admits to a sneaking regard for the Coughing Major, telling Radio Times: ‘He’s trying to be a good husband, a good dad, a good egg. He wants to be entertaining, to do what’s required of him.’ Cheating £1million out of Chris Tarrant just about sums it up.