Ephraim Hardcastle
DEFENCE Secretary Ben Wallace’s draconian downsizing of the British Army’s tank numbers to just 148 will come as a relief to the Queen as her Household Cavalry and Royal Horse Artillery ceremonial horses remain unculled at about 500. Horses rack up huge costs in food, farriers and veterinary bills and, as we revealed, HM discreetly lobbied to prevent cuts to ceremonial units in 2015. She received an assurance of no major adjustments to the Army’s traditions during her reign. That clearly still stands. During the Second World War, the Army had 6,500 horses, several thousand mules and 1,700 camels. Plus ca change.
PRESIDENT Macron’s ostensibly magnanimous loan of the Bayeux Tapestry – now coupled with a €2million repair bill – is criticised by ex-Salisbury Museum curator Peter Saunders, who complains that ‘tens of thousands of folds, holes and tears’ will have to be resewn. He asks: ‘Will visitors wonder if President Macron’s symbolic gesture of friendship after Brexit is really as generous as it once seemed?’ A Gallic stitch-up perhaps?
HAULED up before Hastings magistrates and fined £262 for refusing to pay for a BBC TV licence in 2010, Thatcher biographer Charles Moore is clearing his throat for another heroic court appearance. His lordship faces a £1,000 fine for declining to answer the ethnicity question in the census form. ‘I refused to fill it in’, he explains. ‘It weakens our common Britishness.’ To paraphrase the late Peter Cook: ‘The jury will now retire and consider its verdict of guilty.’
CRICKET fan Cressida Dick once struck up a friendship with Pakistan PM and former player Imran Khan when, as a 20-yearold student, he bowled for Oxford University. Teenage Cressida subsequently wrote to Imran. He wrote back, calling her his ‘first fan’. She’s been a Pakistan aficionado ever since. In the event of Priti Patel declining to renew her Scotland Yard commissionership in 13 months’ time, might Cressida – pictured here recording Test Match Special – have sufficient spare time to renew her postal friendship with Imran?
ALAN Titchmarsh thinks he might have stumbled on the secret of his continued TV success: ‘If you look at all the oldies on the box — Paxman, Attenborough, Palin — they’ve all got hair’, he says, overlooking Paxo’s retirement. But will the glory days of Ground Force ever return? At the height of the gardening programme’s popularity in 2005, Alan’s waxwork was the most kissed at Madame Tussauds.
MOTORHEAD frontman Lemmy’s dying wish that his closest friends receive monogrammed golden bullets containing his ashes has been carried out, according to MTV’s Riki Rachtman: ‘Today I received my bullet’, he wails, ‘and was literally brought to tears.’ Might there be more weeping among Lemmy’s headbanging fraternity if the bullets contravene the Government’s ban on them containing lead shot?