Ephraim Hardcastle
BORIs’s lockdown exit date of June 21 falls a week too late for the Queen, coming after Royal Ascot, Garter Day and Queen’s Cup Polo, all subject to crowd restrictions as well as Trooping the Colour, where containing crowds in the Mall would be virtually impossible. HM was probably far too discreet to utilise yesterday’s weekly telephone audience with the PM to lobby for the bringing forward of the date to allow Covid Liberation street parties on June 19. It’s Boris’s birthday.
AS king-in-waiting, Prince Charles was involved in the appointment of Lord Parker as the Queen’s next Lord Chamberlain, the man who runs the royal household. Parker, ex-head of MI5, will formally have to offer his resignation to Charles at the end of the Queen’s reign. But having someone Charles would be happy to keep in post is thought essential. Institutional memory is a precious thing. It’s not the first time Charles has vetted the candidates. Earl Peel, who leaves the job next month, was a member of the Prince’s Council which helps run the Duchy of Cornwall.
DESIGNER Kelly Hoppen, pictured, tells the Oxford Union why she quit BBC 2’s Dragons’ Den after only appearing for two series as a celebrity investor. ‘I don’t regret doing it but I could not walk down the street without every fourth person asking me for money. It was the only good thing about stopping doing it.’
JENNY Eclair, launching her new Channel 4 amateur painting programme Drawers Off, recalls her early days as a life model at Camberwell Art School near where she now lives with husband Geof. ‘I’m surrounded by people who have nude portraits of me as a young woman in their attics’, she tells Radio Times. Unlike Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Jenny, 60, has grown old gracefully.
TOM stoppard’s biographer Hermione Lee reveals his single deletion from her 834-page tome. It didn’t concern his two failed marriages or affairs with sinead Cusack and Felicity Kendal. ‘He asked for only one change’, she says. ‘That I not reveal the name of an actor who had been fired from the revival of one of his plays. I was very impressed by that.’
DAMIEN Hirst, above, admits flirting with the idea of pickling humans in formaldehyde. ‘I thought about getting a male and a female corpse, cutting them in half and fitting them together’, he says, promoting his St Moritz exhibition. ‘Like a Leonardo da Vinci drawing.’ Haven’t the sharks suffered enough, Damien?