Ephraim Hardcastle
DOES Wallis Simpson merit a public apology from the Royal Family? So claims historian hugo Vickers in tomorrow’s Channel 5 profile of the Duchess of Windsor. It also parallels the treatment of three-times married American Mrs Simpson and once divorced Meghan Markle. She’s described as ‘one of history’s most vilified women’, but Vickers declares: ‘I think Wallis did her best in a very, very difficult situation and there should be a public apology.’
BIOGRAPHER Sir Anthony Seldon wants April’s 300th anniversary of Robert Walpole becoming Britain’s first PM marked with a new museum. It should include ‘replicas of the Cabinet room, PM’s study and Cobra meeting room,’ he explains. Wasn’t there a Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds?
ELIZABETH hurley, pictured, declares solidarity with lockdown sufferers, postponing a Caribbean trip to promote her new beachwear. ‘It didn’t seem right to be drinking banana daiquiris on the beach whilst everyone else was cooped up,’ she says with a straight face. hardly worth a Clap for heroes, Liz.
FERGIE’S new publisher Mills & Boon will surely dismiss as nonsense her biographer Allan Starkie’s recollection of her 1993 book Travels with Queen Victoria. ‘She once bragged to me that she could field any question that was asked about her book on Victoria, even though she had never read it,’ he said.
FORMER Channel 4 news boss Dorothy Byrne has been appointed president of Cambridge’s Murray edwards College, joining a long list of prominent media figures heading Oxbridge colleges. They include Alan Rusbridger and Will hutton, from the Guardian/Observer, plus Mark Damazer, from the BBC, and Roger Mosey, ex-Today editor, and Bridget Kendall, the BBC’s former Moscow correspondent. Isn’t life grand?
HAVING recently bowed out from playing the Queen in The Crown, Olivia Colman displays a severe dose of luvviedom, fretting she’s displeased HM. ‘You’re thinking, “Oh my goodness, what if the Queen watches the series and sees me?”’ she wonders. ‘Perhaps she will think my interpretation is completely wrong.’ Hasn’t she got slightly more to worry about, Olivia darling?
THERESA May’s generosity with cricket gongs is being blamed for the failure to knight Jimmy Anderson, the first englishman to take 600 test wickets. In 2019, she knighted three – Sir Andrew Strauss, Sir Alastair Cook and Sir Geoffrey Boycott. A fourth, Sir Clive Lloyd, received his K not long after she was ousted from Downing Street. Is that why Jimmy must wait?
ENTERTAINER Julian Clary cruelly quips: ‘Is it just me, or does Gavin Williamson look like the sort of man who’d proposition you in the lift of a budget hotel in Ipswich?’