Ephraim Hardcastle
PRINCE William’s decision at 34 to take up full-time royal duties isn’t intended to upstage his father’s position as heir to the throne, although that could be the unwitting result. Allies now say it helps increase the Prince of Wales’s grip on the future House of Windsor. For Charles, 68, hopes his slimmed-down monarchy – essentially William, wife Kate, 35 and brother Harry, 32 – will be fully beddedin before he takes the throne. My source says: ‘It’s hoped William, Kate and Harry will be very pro-active in support of their father and Camilla. There are 70th birthdays for the couple, this year for Camilla and next year for Charles. They’ll be used to signal the message that they are active and retirement is not an option. The next step is getting Kate to accept when the time comes the title of Princess of Wales, the first since Diana.’
HEALTH Secretary Jeremy Hunt, 50, is ‘incredibly proud’ to have founded an education business he’s now sold for £14.5million. He intends using some of his spoils ‘to campaign for causes I believe in when I eventually leave frontline politics’. Perhaps he will also consider repaying the £3,713.95 he charged the taxpayer for Mandarin lessons after marrying his Chinese wife, Lucia Guo, 38, in 2009.
LOST colour footage of a famous cinematic moment, when Marilyn Monroe’s dress was blown up as she stood over a subway air vent for a scene in her 1954 movie, The Seven Year Itch, has turned up in New York. It was shot by amateur cameraman and local furrier, Jules Schulback. Although Ms Monroe wore two pairs of knickers in the scene, pictured, they didn’t protect her modesty entirely. Her new husband, baseball star Joe DiMaggio, who’d turned up on the set unexpectedly, was incensed by the public gawping. Divorce proceedings began three weeks later.
SPEAKER John Bercow – himself a former Conservative MP – enjoys tormenting the Tories. Yesterday he did it by praising Labour’s Brexit spokesman, Sir Keir Starmer, who was making a long-winded reply to Secretary of State David Davis’s statement. ‘The honourable gentleman is a learned and celebrated and cerebral individual, I don’t want to interrupt him,’ he gushed, explaining that it was customary for replies to be half the length of statements. He added: ‘I can indulge the honourable gentleman modestly.’ Bercow himself may be overindulged. Like amateur pianist Mary Bennet in Pride & Prejudice, hasn’t he ‘delighted us long enough’?
US satirist Bill Maher, 60 – seen here on Comedy Central – is worried that Donald Trump will have control of the Justice Department and the FBI. In 2013, in response to Trump claiming (falsely) that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the US, Maher announced that the tycoon was the product of humanorangutan crossbreeding. This explained his extraordinary hair colour and texture, he added. Trump’s lawyer sent a copy of his birth certificate together with a claim for financial compensation, which Maher ignored.