Ephraim Hardcastle
BORIS Johnson is urged to come to the electoral rescue of Rishi Sunak – but the PM will have to ask him personally, we are told. How childish (if true). But wouldn’t appearing to rely on Bojo to help him win the general election finish off poor Rishi altogether?
WHEN she first burst on to the London scene, the Tokyoborn model Marie
Helvin, pictured, the daughter of a GI and a Japanese translator, seemed a truly exotic and mysterious presence, even after marrying the brilliant, priapic Cockney photographer David Bailey. Now 71, she risks losing her mystique by confiding in an interview that she can’t remember when she last had casual sex – the only kind available now, evidently – without a condom.
IS Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron welcome these days at formal dinners in his Oxford college, Brasenose? Its principal, John Bowers, in his book Downward Spiral: Collapsing Public Standards And How To Restore Them, rips into the ex-Tory PM. He appears 32 times in the index, with the Greensill scandal as Bowers’ final example of Cameron’s political cronyism. Bowers calls Cameron’s texts to Rishi Sunak in favour of his tycoon friend Lex Greensill ‘jaw dropping’ and critiques the ‘relentless lobbying by a former PM’.
ACTOR Ralph Fiennes, pictured, produces helpful headlines calling for ‘trigger warnings’ to be scrapped for theatregoers. He insists that audiences should be ‘shocked and disturbed’. Certainly some of his fans were shocked and disturbed to read that in 2007 he’d romped with a Qantas air stewardess in an aircraft lavatory at 35,000ft. His publicist Sara Keene later announced: ‘She [the air stewardess] initiated the encounter... She was the sexual aggressor.’ Ms Keene didn’t help matters by clarifying: ‘Of course he could have said no.’
TOP chef Marco Pierre White startles a Cambridge Union audience with a personal admission about his son Marco Junior, 28: ‘I have got a son who is a heroin addict. Why? I can’t possibly answer that question.’ He adds: ‘You know, a good b********g did not do anybody any harm. It gave me a spine.’ But is Marco Jr beyond b********g now?
BRIDESHEAD Revisited actress Diana Quick recalls falling foul of the late Queen when she met her as head of the Oxford University Dramatic Society and explained in detail why students were rioting in Paris. ‘Queen Elizabeth’s equerry tapped me on the shoulder and I was told off for “leading” the Queen in conversation,’ she says. ‘I felt quite sorry for her. I thought, she’s never going to have a proper exchange with people.’ Might Diana’s ‘explaining in detail’ have riled the monarch?