Ephraim Hardcastle

THE £200million Garden Bridge over the Thames has been scrapped while the £700million Millennium Dome – regarded as a disaster at the time – is now a thriving, multi-purpose arena. Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and their assorted creeps got behind the dome and even forced the Queen to abandon her traditional relaxed new year’s eve at Sandringham for the opening ceremony. Would those who killed off the Garden Bridge – rent-a-quote London mayor Sadiq Khan among them – have done so if it had been designated the Diana Bridge, commemorating the doomed princess on the 20th anniversary of her death? Not if her sons, William and Harry, were on board. There is a Princess of Wales Bridge over the Tees which she opened in 1992. But it’s for cars, not herbaceous borders. ALEX Salmond’s Edinburgh Festival ‘joke’ – ‘I promised you we’d either have Theresa May or Nicola Sturgeon, or Ruth Davidson or Melania Trump, but I couldn’t make any of these wonderful women come... to the show’ – went down like a plate of century-old haggis. The ex-first minister, 62, had promised not to do stand-up comedy in his show, telling Radio 4’s John Humphrys last week: ‘Politicians who do stand-up fall down.’ Indeed they do! MOODY Blues star Justin Hayward, 70, celebrating the 50th anniversary of his mega-hit Nights In White Satin, regrets his teenage publishing deal with Tyler Music, owned by the late skiffle king Lonnie Donegan MBE, pictured, who died aged 71 in 2002. For eight years after signing the contract, none of the songs that Hayward wrote – including Nights In White Satin – belonged to him. He recalls: ‘Lonnie’s widow contacted me ten years ago and asked if I wanted to buy back the 12-string guitar I had then. She wanted a lot of money.’ ARE President Donald Trump and his extended family any worse than the late President John F Kennedy and his brothers, Robert and Edward? Arguably they were sleazier than Trump in their approach to women, but their indiscretions were kept secret by kow-towing liberal journalists. While the world was told JFK forced the Soviets to remove their Cuban-based missiles in 1962, they didn’t disclose that America had to do the same with theirs in Turkey. US commentator Ross Douthat says: ‘It isn’t the first time a reckless, lecherous US president obsessed with his own vigour and out of his depth on foreign policy faced off against a thirtysomething dictator armed with nukes. If we survived the Cuban missile crisis without a thermonuclear war, there’s probably a way to get through this one, too.’ WRITING under the nom de plume Sam Bourne, broadcaster Jonathan Freedland’s latest novel. To Kill The President, has a populist US leader who has been in power for only a few months declaring a nuclear strike against North Korea after a war of words conducted chiefly on Twitter. Impressively, the book was written before Donald Trump took office. Freedland says: ‘I’ve since had people asking me to do their lottery numbers – or, pick the winner of the 3.10 at Haydock Park for them.’