Ephraim Hardcastle
THE taxpayer-funded £369million refurbishment of Buckingham Palace is under way. Will King Charles live there in the future? ‘Buckingham Palace will remain the official London residence of the monarch,’ says a royal source. Which isn’t saying he’ll live there. Apparently the Queen never wanted to move there from Clarence House but the then PM Winston Churchill insisted. Can you imagine Theresa May demanding that Charles do the same?
SAVE the Children International boss Helle Thorning-Schmidt, 50, the former Danish prime minister and wife of anti-Brexit Labour MP Stephen Kinnock, tells Newsnight’s Evan Davis that Britain must give more than its current £10.4million per year to help with the Myanmar Rohingya situation. Nicknamed ‘Gucci Helle’ for her expensive tastes, she is paid £246,750 a year. Rejected by Danes in 2015, she quickly found – like David Miliband, head of International Rescue on £530,922 – that charity can be a nice little earner.
GLENN Close, 70, pictured as ‘bunny boiler’ Alex in the 1987 film Fatal Attraction, says she was forced to change the original ending – she slit her throat in the bath while listening to Madame Butterfly. Six months after filming ended, producers said a new climax was needed because cinema-goers would want to see Alex punished. So she is shot by Michael Douglas’s screen wife, Anne Archer. It infuriated feminists – and Close herself – but is estimated to have added $100million to box office takings.
NEW York-based Salman Rushdie, 70, sneers that Britons don’t understand the damage of Brexit, saying: ‘I feel about England right now that it’s like a family having a picnic on a railway track – “What’s that hooting noise? Owls?”.’ Knighted in 2007 on the advice of Tony Blair, protected at a cost of £11million after being sentenced to death by Iranian mullahs, he has taken US citizenship. Rushdie doesn’t do gratitude.
HM’S retiring private secretary, the unfailingly polite Sir Christopher Geidt, has a steely side. A former Scots Guard and Intelligence Corps officer, he successfully sued journalist John Pilger for libel for claiming he taught Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge guerrillas how to lay mines.
THERESA May has accepted a discount card from the upmarket shoe shop LK Bennett, she discloses in the new list of members’ interests. She also has cards from clothes designer Amanda Wakeley and cobblers Russell & Bromley. In the new register she states: ‘Receipt of a discount card from LK Bennett, valid May 2017 to April 2018.’
PICASSO’S femme accroupie, depicting Jacqueline Roque, the artist’s ‘muse’ in 1954, when she was 27 and he 73, is expected to fetch up to £22million when it is auctioned at Christie’s in New York in November. Picasso often rearranged body parts in his paintings, prompting one US comic to quip: ‘Excuse me, Mr Picasso, may I have a word in your eye?’