Ephraim Hardcastle

ACTOR Kevin Spacey isn’t the first commoner to perch on the Buckingham Palace throne. ‘Everyone has a camera these days, so palace staff and even police officers on duty have been snapped on the throne,’ claims my source, adding: ‘The bigger prize is being photographed sitting on Her Majesty’s bed, like Michael Fagan, who broke into the palace in 1982.’ STILL warbling songbird Petula Clark, 85 today, who received a CBE in 1998, says: ‘I can’t remember what I’ve done with it. I haven’t laid eyes on it in years.’ I think she would now prefer to be a DBE, ie a dame. PROMOTING his art book, the Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood, 70, tells Radio 4: ‘It can go horribly wrong – it could be an awful rendering of Mick [Jagger].’ Do bandmates fret about how he makes them look? ‘Yeah, they sure do. In no uncertain terms.’ FIFTY years after Mick Jagger and his then girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, pictured, ‘shared’ a Mars bar, top West End producer, Bill Kenwright, tells friends that the story was misreported, adding that one of them confided: ‘It wasn’t a Mars Bar, it was a Marathon’ – now known as Snickers, rhyming with knickers. PRINCE Charles’s birthday merited a brief passage from the National Anthem on Radio 4 at 7am. This gesture is deplored on Twitter by broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer, 49. Has she now developed a taste for self-publicity after her headline-grabbing revelation that disgraced ex-Defence Secretary Michael Fallon once rested a hand on her knee? EAMONN Holmes, 57, the nation’s favourite breakfast TV presenter, according to a Radio Times poll, has survived a number of near-fatal on-air gaffes. Interviewing ‘half-Lebanese’ actress Salma Hayek, Holmes inquired: ‘You’re a lesbian?’ HOME Secretary Amber Rudd, 54, addressing the Centre for Policy Studies, charmed her hosts with a story about being invited to appear on BBC2’s Newsnight shortly after becoming an MP in 2010. Telling them she was tired, Miss Rudd added gamely that if they got to the end of their list of possible invitees without finding anyone she might change her mind. ‘But you are the last name,’ she was told. Although some Thatcherites might regard her as a Left-winger, is she now first on the CPS list as Theresa May’s successor? FORMER shadow chancellor Ed Balls, of Strictly Come Dancing fame, now features as the ‘victim’ of a mobile phone prank in comedian Michael McIntyre’s Big Show on Saturday. McIntyre, 41, explains: ‘I sent the silliest text from Ed’s phone inviting people to a hot tub party at his house with Strictly’s Anton du Beke and hip-hop star Stormzy. Let’s just say a lot of people were up for it!’ Did they hope Mr Balls’s perky wife, MP Yvette Cooper, would be relaxing in the tub?