Hardcastle
BELEAGUERED Theresa May is ‘more down to earth than Margaret Thatcher and doesn’t feel the need to curtsy constantly in the Queen’s presence’, opines a royal source, adding that the view from the palace is that ‘Brexit should have been dealt with much more quickly and they wonder where the money is coming from’ – a reference to our £39billion EU ‘divorce bill’.
REMEMBER Amanda Lear, pictured, 1970s disco queen and supermodel? She’s published her memoirs in Paris, gossiping about being a consort to rockers Rolling Stone Brian Jones and David Bowie. Of a more interesting affair, with surrealist painter Salvador Dali, she says: ‘He was totally impotent. Even when he used to frequent brothels with Picasso.’ As it happens, Dali’s most famous painting features a drooping clock.
ADVICE from Gordon Brown’s former fixer Damian McBride on Cabinet resignations: ‘The decision is always part principle and part calculation. Robin Cook resigning over Iraq in 2003 was 100 per cent principle, while David Miliband NOT resigning in 2009 was 100 per cent calculation.’
THE PM is compared to Irish republican leader Michael Collins by the Irish Times. After signing the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty establishing the Irish Free State, which retained the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown, a civil war ensued and, in August 1922, Collins was assassinated by republicans. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that!
JEREMY Corbyn told the Commons on the occasion or Prince Charles’s 70th birthday: ‘I was thinking of giving His Royal Highness a jar of Corbyn Originals jam from my allotment.’ Yet Corbyn opposed letting the prince succeed his mother, saying last year: ‘Wouldn’t that be an appropriate time to call it a day and have an elected head of state.’
JON Trickett, Labour’s Cabinet Office spokesman, responding to Dominic Raab’s resignation as Brexit Secretary, declares: ‘Theresa May has no authority left.’ Curiously, he didn’t says this when 103 MPs resigned from Corbyn’s front bench team.
TOM Cruise is ‘axed’ as movie character Jack Reacher after the latter’s creator Lee Child deemed him too short to play the part of the 6ft 5in former US military policeman. Yet the 5ft 7in superstar can appear surprisingly tall. A fellow actor, over 6ft, says they appeared to be the same height, ‘until I realised he was wearing boots with unusually high heels’.
COMIC John Cleese causes offence again. Commenting on Twitter about the California wildfires, which have claimed at least 50 lives, he said he’d been invited to a Sacramento restaurant near the worst-affected area. He says the owner told him several customers were from the burned-to-theground nearby town of Paradise, adding: ‘She told me that they wanted everything they ordered flambéd.’ Oh dear.