Ephraim Hardcastle
DOES ex-PM David Cameron feel any personal responsibility for the politically embarrassing Kids Company case? He is said to have been ‘besotted’ with the charity’s founder, Camila Batmanghelidjh, who might be barred from running companies when it is over. Her charity received £42million from the Government over 19 years. When current No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings worked for Michael Gove, then Education Secretary, they decided taxpayer funding to it should cease. But they were ‘personally ordered’ by Cameron that the money should continue to flow. Curiously, Ms Batmanghelidjh doesn’t rate a mention in Dave’s recent autobiography.
IS THERE a ‘royal for the North’ in these regionally divisive times? The Queen has a house in Norfolk and is Duke of Lancaster but now seldom travels. Prince Andrew is Duke of York but he’s on the naughty step. Wales and Cornwall have Prince Charles, and Princess Anne is the royal for Scotland. Might Prince William – a supporter of Aston Villa – fit the bill? He empathised with business owners in Tier 3 Liverpool this week and expressed fears of a ‘mental health catastrophe’ from lockdowns.
NOTING that they separately played villains in Paddington and Paddington 2, movie star pals Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman, right, joke about teaming up for a third instalment after collaborating in a new TV murder drama, The Undoing. Grant suggests sardonically: ‘Let’s do it. Paddington 3... it begins with the death of the bear, dismembered and devoured.’
WHILE health secretary in the last Labour government, Andy Burnham – currently posing as bellicose, man of the people Mayor of Manchester – presented himself as an Establishment type. When Prince Charles urged greater use of homeopathy on the NHS, Burnham wrote to him saying, ‘I would be delighted to meet with you at Clarence House at your convenience to discuss this and other topics of interest to us both.’ Signing off with, ‘I have the honour to remain, Sir, Your Royal Highness’s most humble and obedient servant.’
A FORTHCOMING book – A Friendship In Letters: Robert Louis Stevenson and JM Barrie – says the writers corresponded near the end of Stevenson’s life, when RLS lived in Samoa and Barrie in Kirriemuir, Angus. RLS confesses, tantalisingly, ‘I love you, and if you had been a woman…’, signing off one missive with, ‘I wish I was this letter now that I might see you in the flesh.’ Barrie’s birthplace incidentally is immortalised by an unrepeatably bawdy Scots song, The Ball of Kirriemuir, which begins, ‘Four and twenty virgins came down from Inverness / And when the ball was over there were four and twenty less.’
OSCAR-winning Sir Anthony Hopkins, 82, is promoting, in Vogue, ‘AH Eau De Parfum’ – his ‘timeless elegant fragrance’. Based in California, he adds: ‘Whether I’m playing music or painting in my studio, the fragrance creates a mood of peace and invokes a strange sense of gratitude.’ Each purchase commendably ‘provides up to 50 meals to kids in need through (US charity) No Kid Hungry’. Isn’t life fragrant?