Ephraim Hardcastle

THE Queen will be at St Margaret’s, Westminster, today at the memorial service for her late brotherin-law the Earl of Snowdon – one of the few people allowed to call HM by her childhood nickname, Lilibet. Originally an outsider, photographer Snowdon eventually held two peerages. When hereditary peers were ejected from the Lords in 1999, he chose to accept a (non-transferrable) life peerage as Baron Armstrong-Jones. However, his posh furniture maker son David, the 2nd Earl of Snowdon, 55, is able to pass the earldom to his son, Charles. BOND producer Barbara Broccoli, 56, rules out Avengers and The Night Manager star Tom Hiddleston, 36, for 007, saying he’s ‘not tough enough’ for the role, according to the New York Post. An unkind blow for Hiddleston – and, surely, for Luke Windsor, whom he describes as his ‘friend, publicist and nanny’. MP Mark Reckless, 46, who has defected from Ukip to the Tories – having done the reverse in 2014 – is a quirky chap. Shortly after being elected for Rochester and Strood in 2010, he was too tired to vote in the Commons after carousing with friends on the parliamentary terrace, saying later: ‘I apologise unreservedly and don’t plan to drink again at Westminster.’ HAVE Lefties gone off the saintly-seeming Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, 71, pictured, winner of a Nobel Peace Prize and the US Congressional Gold Medal? After having her on Desert Island Discs, the BBC’s Kirsty Young effused: ‘The experience was so intense and had such a surreal quality about it that I forgot to ask her which of the eight tracks she would save… My mind was busy doing cartwheels of joy.’ But ‘Myanmar’s great hope fails to live up to expectations’, says a Guardian report about the Aung San Suu Kyi government’s ethnic cleansing of Myanmar’s Muslims. CHANNEL 4 broadcasts the second part of its Spying On The Royals documentary on Sunday, covering the security service’s eavesdropping on Edward VIII during the 1930s abdication crisis. Will they feature ‘Camillagate’ of 1993, which featured a saucy, phone-hacked-by-spooks chat between Charles and Camilla? As the current New Yorker magazine recalls, in a long article about ‘deeply unpopular’ Charles, ‘the public learned that the Prince yearned to be his ladyship’s tampon’. It adds unnecessarily that some Italian newspapers refer to our heir apparent as ‘Il Tampaccino’. Scandaloso! FIRST MINISTER Nicola Sturgeon recently joined in an erudite Twitter discussion about the merits of fiction and non-fiction writing, declaring herself a fan of ‘quality’ historical fiction. Cue internet wits pointing to the SNP’s 2014 independence referendum prospectus, Scotland’s Future, as the epitome of the genre. PADDINGTON’S creator Michael Bond CBE, 91, says he modelled his famous bear on his own father, recalling: ‘He was a very polite man. He always wore a hat when he went out, in case he met a lady he knew. On holiday, he even went into the sea with his hat on. There’s so much rudeness in England these days. People don’t say please or thank you. At least Paddington still raises his hat.’