Ephraim Hardcastle
HOW fares the Queen with her new puppies helping her to cope with mourning? Dorgi Fergus and corgi Muick, like all royal dogs, are notorious nippers, traditionally given free rein, with those bitten advised that it was their own fault for petting them in the first place. One footman who ended up floored with a sprained ankle was ignored as the hound was checked over for damage by HM. No danger of Fergus and Muick suffering the fate of President Joe Biden’s German shepherd, Major. He is currently undergoing ‘re-education’ for biting White House staff.
EMBARRASSMENT alert for Michael Gove. Broadcaster Jay Rayner unearths a teenage poem expressing his resentment at fellow schoolboys’ success with women. It reads: ‘The constant re-telling of lewd innuendos, assails your sensitive ears. The score is the number of women you’ve had, while still keeping down all those beers... They are the beautiful people, but in their mouths beauty has died.’ Observes Rayner: ‘It’s all there, isn’t it, that bitter twisted “You think you’re so much better than me, but you’re ugly and I will win in the end”?’
MEANWHILE, Boris’s alleged ‘pile the bodies high’ gaffe might have been inspired by his penchant for reciting chunks of famous verse during political crises. One Downing Street chatty rat suggests he was misquoting US poet Carl Sandburg’s anti-war poem Grass. ‘Pile them high at Gettysburg, Pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work.’ Inconveniently, Sandburg’s moving poem makes no mention of ‘no more ****ing lockdowns’.
SUSANNAH Fielding, pictured, about to reprise her role as presenter Jennie Gresham on the spoof BBC chat show This Time with Alan Partridge, claims she could replace Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain. ‘I think I would do a great job,’ she says. ‘Me and Susanna Reid, we’d have an absolute riot. And we’d finally be changing the age-old dynamic of the curmudgeonly old man and the glamorous sidekick.’ Piers a curmudgeon, Susannah? Never!
TOM Jones made no secret of canoodling with over 250 women annually during his marriage to wife Linda, who died five years ago. Now he claims: ‘It wasn’t an open marriage, though.’ So, Tom, what about the additional dressing room on tour, dubbed ‘The Workbench’, for romping with groupies?
ITV’S delightfully daft political editor Robert Peston’s claim to have two ‘earwitnesses’ to the Prime Minister’s reported ‘pile the bodies high’ outburst follows Boris’s 2019 exclamation of ‘nonsense’ when Robert’s blonde bombshell girlfriend Charlotte Edwardes alleged the future PM groped her under the table at a Spectator lunch. Isn’t life grand!