Ephraim Hardcastle
PRINCE Harry is to make a speech at an informal meeting of the UN on July 18 – Nelson Mandela International Day. This is appropriate. He was so inspired by the great African leader’s book Long Walk To Freedom that he chose Finding Freedom for his own tome about he and wife Meghan’s harrowing royal travails. Isn’t life grand?
KEITH Richards, talking about his late Rolling Stones band mate Charlie Watts in a BBC2 documentary My Life As A Rolling Stone which airs on July 23, says he helped the drummer kick a heroin habit in the 1980s: ‘I told him that it is just not you. Charlie Watts didn’t need any stimulants. He was an immaculate conception. Bless his heart.’ Watts died last year aged 80.
THE father of ex-BBC hip-hop DJ Tim Westwood, 64 – currently accused of sexual impropriety but who strongly denies any wrongdoing – was the late Bill Westwood, a former Norfolk vicar who became Bishop of Peterborough. ‘He virtually haunted the TV studios of Anglia TV and BBC East in Norwich,’ says a local source. ‘Agreeable, smiling, available whenever the camera was rolling, he gained much from his exposure, becoming a regular on Radio 4’s Thought For The Day.’
IS IT all getting too much for former Tory
MP and ex-minister the Rt Hon David Davis,
73, whose over-casual appearance, pictured, while chatting to Sky
News’s always-verywell-turned-out Kay
Burley prompts Robert
Hutton – a writer on The Critic magazine – to liken him to ‘a tourist who lost everything in a cruel nightclub scam’.
WHEN Boris Johnson first suggested a new royal yacht, one of his MPs urged him to ‘be bold’ – Penny Mordaunt, now boldly seeking to be his successor and named after HMS Penelope, a light cruiser sunk by a German U-boat off Naples in 1944. HM remains non-committal on replacing Britannia, killed off by John Major and Chancellor Norman Lamont after criticism over the taxpayer funding firedamaged Windsor Castle’s repair. But wouldn’t a new royal yacht funded by big business attract as many ‘exotic’ benefactors as Prince Charles’s charities?
ECCENTRIC actress Miriam Margolyes, who now regrets ‘blacking up’ for theatre roles in pre-woke times, once had an autograph-signing session costing fans £5 a time but she told one of them: ‘I’m giving you a discount because you’re black. Jews and blacks, they get a discount!’
THE Royal Collection’s annual report, out this week, makes interesting reading. HM’s extensive art collection retains the services of 141 expert staff including 31 involved in ‘curatorial and conservation, pictures’. But there is no Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, a position dating back to 1625 and once adorned by Sir Anthony Blunt, a Russian spy. The most recent, Desmond Shawe-Taylor, lost his post in pandemic cutbacks. While HM retains a Yeoman Bed Hanger and Bed Goer, Hereditary Grand Carver and Swan Marker, it seems the Royal Collection – the largest private one in the world – no longer needs a Surveyor.