Ephraim Hardcastle
DEPUTY Speaker Eleanor Laing has become a Dame of the British Empire. Now all three deputies – the other two are Sir Lindsay Hoyle and Dame Rosie Winterton – have titles and gongs to wear on state occasions. As for the (ungonged) Speaker himself, John Bercow, I hear that if Number 10 tries to block the peerage traditionally requested by MPs for the Speaker – to spite Bercow, who is accused of Labour bias – the Queen is likely to disapprove. ‘She might even give Bercow the Garter, although no previous Speaker has received that honour,’ says my source. Sir John Bercow preening his ostrich feathers on Garter Day? A sight for sore eyes.
HOLLYWOOD actor Richard Gere had a new, £2,000-plus Armani suit from Harrods delivered every day to the Barnes, London, set of BBC2’s forthcoming, eight-part series, Mother-Father-Son, I hear. An old friend of the Dalai Lama, Gere, pictured in the series, plays a media tycoon supposedly modelled on Rupert Murdoch.
FORMER Washington ambassador Robin Renwick recalls in Not Quite A Diplomat (Biteback, £20) that black US Secretary of State Colin Powell was entertained by London friends (and namesakes) Charles and Carla Powell, after receiving his honorary knighthood. Somewhat clunkingly, Charles declared to his guest that the Powell family tradition ‘was that the first son inherited the estate, the second went into the Armed Forces and the third into the church while the black sheep went off to the colonies’. Adding with breathtaking insouciance: ‘It’s a great pleasure to welcome the black sheep back again!’ Diplomatically, Colin Powell said it was ‘not a speech that could have been made in the United States’.
JENNIFER Aniston’s most recent ex, Justin Theroux, 47, Instagrams on her 50th birthday: ‘Happy Birthday to this fierce Woman. Fiercely loving. Fiercely kind... and fiercely funny.’ Perhaps the fierceness was too much for Theroux. He didn’t turn up for the party. Her first former husband, Brad Pitt, 55, did, though, causing fierce speculation.
PRINCE Charles is spearheading plans for a memorial on the Normandy beaches to the thousands of members of the British armed forces who lost their lives there on D-Day and during the subsequent Battle of Normandy. The foundation stone is being laid this summer. I wonder if hatred over how we rescued them from Hitler is behind President Emmanuel Macron’s vow to punish us for Brexit?
FINANCIAL Times associate editor Pilita Clark, writing about sex in the workplace, claims no ‘flirty jokes’ are ever made at the pink paper. ‘The FT is more John Stuart Mill than Benny Hill,’ she says, adding: ‘A colleague told me about a news meeting that had been so quietly pensive that the motion-detecting lights all turned themselves off.’