Ephraim Hardcastle
THE Queen celebrated the 65th anniversary of her coronation on Saturday. Happily there is no sign that Operation Golden Orb, the detailed plan for the coronation of her successor, will come soon. Drawn up by a committee headed by the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of England, it envisages a slimmed down ceremony with only a few hundred seats added to Westminster Abbey’s 2,000 capacity – nothing like the 8,000 crammed in for the 1953 service. It allows for just three months between Charles’s accession and coronation rather than the 15 months for the Queen. The Abbey is likely to be closed to the public for just a couple of weeks rather than almost a year of disruption before the 1953 coronation. Back then admission was free. Now it’s £22 a head, providing 46 per cent of the Abbey’s £35.3million income in 2017.
APROPOS Operation Golden Orb: Charles has had no direct input and won’t until the time comes. It doesn’t include any plan for the crowning of Camilla as Queen Consort – but Charles might have a different view.
THERESA May, pictured, suffered a mini breakdown in the immediate aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, according to novelist Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books. Coming days after losing her Tory majority in the 2017 General Election she was disgruntled by the hostile reaction she received visiting the site: ‘She was floored by its contrast to the reception Jeremy Corbyn had received, and was determined to find the reason,’ writes O’Hagan.
DURING the Thorpe trial, Labour officials at Transport House devised a satirical ditty sung to the old song Those Foolish Things which included the verse, ‘Dead dogs on Dartmoor and a hired killer/ A set of teethmarks on a bitten pillow/ A division bell that never rings/ These foolish things remind me of you.’ As a lover of old musicals, Norman Scott might have approved. After Thorpe was arrested, Scott descended the staircase of the Imperial Hotel, Barnstaple, singing ‘I’m the queen in your copy...’ (cream in your coffee) to amuse the assembled journalists.
SIR Ken Dodd’s widow Anne – they married two days before his death in March – has agreed to succeed him as a life patron of the British Music Hall Society. At the annual stage spectacular at Eastbourne’s Royal Hippodrome on Saturday, society president Roy Hudd got the audience to sing Sir Ken’s hit song Happiness and Anne was visibly moved when she received a tremendous ovation as she joined Roy on stage.
No fan of Donald Trump, the BBC’s North America editor Jon Sopel, 59, tells The Jewish Chronicle: ‘Call me sheltered but in the course of covering politics I had never hitherto discussed penis size or a woman’s vagina – but these were subjects that now had their moments in the sun.’