Ephraim Hardcastle
FOREIGN Secretary Boris Johnson’s flight to Afghanistan, sheepishly avoiding voting with his party for a third Heathrow runway he opposed, makes him the latest political Macavity – author T.S. Eliot’s mystery cat ‘who was too clever to leave any evidence of his guilt’. So who (the Government or an airline) flew him to Kabul and what did it cost? The FO won’t tell me. Boris wants a new airport on the Thames Estuary, which would cost (an estimated) £50billion, take decades to build and wasn’t even his idea. It has been suggested at various times since the 1940s. Is the Boris-for-PM moment over?
ASKED about how he feels about his film director chum Roman Polanski, 84, novelist Robert Harris, 61 – his book, The Ghost, was filmed by the diminutive Pole – tells BBC’s Andrew Marr: ‘Morally, I don’t see why I should change my position because the fashion has changed.’ Sky’s Kay Burley, referring to Polanski being accused 40 years ago of sodomising a 13-year-old girl in California, pointedly asks on Twitter if sex with a 13-year-old girl was fashionable in 1977, adding: ‘Don’t think so.’
KNIGHTED this week by Prince Charles, 71-year-old Bee Gees star Sir Barry Gibb’s first meeting with his wife of 48 years, former Miss Edinburgh Linda Gray – now Lady Gibb, 67, if you please – is a source of troubling memories. The pair, pictured, were introduced after Miss Gray travelled to London aged 17 for a 1967 Top of the Pops broadcast by Jimmy Savile. She was one of the lucky ones who got away from Savile, who turned out to be a paedophile ‘in plain sight’ but seemingly invisible to the then BBC management.
SIR Ray Davies, 74, announces that his much-admired rock band, The Kinks, will get together again after more than 20 years. His brother and ex-bandmate Dave Davies, 71, has previously suggested, unhelpfully, that this would be like ‘a poor remake of Night Of The Living Dead’. How do the zombie-like Rolling Stones still cut the mustard on the tour circuit?
DEFENCE Secretary Gavin ‘Stupid Boy!’ Williamson appeared on Channel 4’s documentary, Inside The American Embassy, asking US ambassador to the UK, Woody Johnson, if they might meet there. Instead he was offered an appointment ‘in central London’. Why so? Woody’s boss, President Donald Trump, hates the new, billion-dollar embassy in unfashionable, south-of-the-river Nine Elms.
VOICEOVER queen Mariella Frostrup, 55, uses the death of super-chef Anthony Bourdain to recall her fling with one-time kitchen enfant terrible Marco Pierre White, saying: ‘His determination to woo me was flattering and intense. He turned up at my door with a pack of sausages, some onions, a bag of spuds and insisted on rustling up bangers and mash for me and my grateful girlfriends.’ If his ardour was so intense, wouldn’t the onceMichelin-starred Marco, 56, have rustled up something grander?