Hardcastle Ephraim
BREXITEER Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg is asked by Conservative Home editor Paul Goodman about remaining loyal to philandering colleague Boris Johnson. Father-of-six Rees-Mogg’s biblical response, from Matthew 7: ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ Later, Sky’s Jayne Secker asked the always-civil Rees-Mogg: ‘You are a committed Catholic. How do you feel about having somebody who is soon to be divorced, who appears to have had a myriad of affairs, being the leader of the country?’ Rees-Mogg: ‘Monk-like behaviour has never been a prerequisite for being prime minister.’ Indeed so. Six of our prime ministers are identified as adulterers – Robert Walpole, Lord Palmerston and Viscount Melbourne, Benjamin Disraeli, Herbert Asquith, David Lloyd George. John Major’s dalliance with Edwina Currie? That ended in 1988, prior to him becoming PM.
APROPOS adulterous statesmen, ex-Tory minister Ann Widdecombe, 70, tells my colleague Andrew Pierce on his Friday night LBC show that she would have no objection to Boris Johnson occupying No10. She says: ‘It only matters if criminality, hypocrisy or going too far are involved.’ Too far? She adds: ‘When (ex-Tory transport minister) Steven Norris got to mistress number five, that was going too far.’
WHICH royal will promote female football? There’s high-profile female royal support in equine sport, tennis, sailing, bobsleigh, cycling, lacrosse, hockey and even rugby but not football. With three of the seven women’s world cup finals having been won by the USA, surely the still-American Meghan, pictured, wife of football-mad Harry, would be an amusing choice.
AFTER a weekend with the Queen at Balmoral, Theresa May has cemented her position with the monarch, allies say. ‘Mrs May possesses the necessary blend of deference and charm, the ability to politely challenge an opinion and knows which knife and fork to use, but there’s something more,’ opines my source. ‘As well as staying for the whole weekend and going to church, Mrs May had sensible shoes, tweeds and a Sunday bonnet in her luggage. Margaret Thatcher stayed only one night, arriving just in time for dinner and heading back to London before breakfast – coming and going in heels.’
SIR Salman Rushdie, 71, says his 1988 book, The Satanic Verses – for which he was sentenced to death in 1989 by Iran’s mullahs – is now recognised as a comic novel. Perhaps so, but arguably the late VS Naipaul’s comment about it – that the Rushdie fatwa was merely ‘an extreme form of literary criticism’ – was funnier.
RECALLING The Who’s Keith Moon, 40 years after his death, bandmate Pete Townshend says they once received an invitation from ‘a woman called Joanna Lumley, asking one of us to come to meet her somewhere in London. Keith offered to go, very much hoping it would lead to something sexual. It turned out she’d invited him to visit the first women’s refuge. Joanna had him cleaning toilets’.