Ephraim Hardcastle
THE Queen attends the mini-Trooping the Colour at Windsor tomorrow with the BBC’s Custodian of the Royal Microphone, Huw Edwards, padding out a one-third reduced programme with recorded interviews and archive footage. The scaling down follows military objections to hundreds of soldiers being diverted to Windsor during the pandemic. And the Welsh Guards, trooping their colour, will be without their colonel Prince Charles. He’s still obeying Nicola Sturgeon’s lockdown at Birkhall.
THE speech by ambitious Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu urging people to stand up to racism fires the starting pistol in the race to replace his boss Cressida Dick in 2022. Could anti-terror chief Basu, the Yard’s highest ranking BAME officer, become the first Asian commissioner? Says a colleague: ‘It’s his to lose.’
ED Balls – pictured draped in ermine as Queen Elizabeth I – hasn’t thrown his crown into the ring in the JK Rowling transgender debate. Ed appears in a BBC series explaining history to children during lockdown, and a corporation spokesman confirms he is now a showbiz fixture, saying: ‘Despite being an MP for ten years Ed is probably best known for when he danced to Gangnam Style in front of millions on Strictly!’
BARBARA Amiel mourns her Hungarian mountain dog. ‘She was named Maya after the widow of our late friend and Barbara’s former husband, George Jonas,’ explains husband Lord (Conrad) Black. Jonas was Babs’s second husband and so close to the couple that Black’s lawyer once quipped if the couple divorced who would get Jonas.
WHEN Soho’s Groucho club reopens, Damian Hirst won’t be welcome. The shark-pickling artist is banned for life after urinating into a pint glass and pouring the contents into the ice-making machine. At least it wasn’t his trademark formaldehyde.
ROSALIND Mann, who has died, photographed Country Life’s posh ‘girls in pearls’ for 30 years. Explaining the origin of the title, she said: ‘Pearls enhanced the glow of a young lady’s cheeks and if my subject turned up without the required jewels, I would lend my own.’ And the only condition for posing? ‘We never featured anyone whose house had a number.’
CONTRACTING a severe dose of Covid-19 just before lockdown, Jack Whitehall feared he’d given it to his dad Michael, 80. ‘I was really terrified that I’d seen Michael the week before and had no idea that I had it,’ he says. ‘It was a very scary couple of weeks, not wanting to hear him cough on the phone. That feeling that you could give it to someone you love is overwhelming.’
MIGHT Jacob Rees-Mogg’s now discarded Commons queue system prompt him to resurrect floccinaucinihilipilification, the longest word ever recorded in Hansard? It means ‘the action or habit of estimating something as worthless’.