Ephraim Hardcastle
WITH applications just closed for the post of BBC Radio 4 controller, the former World Service MD John Tusa has thrown his toys out of the pram, accusing his previous employers of loathing the highbrow station’s middleclass audience as they pursue younger listeners. ‘BBC class guilt, even dislike, has run corrosively through its veins. No other organisation would undervalue and disregard its key audience in this way,’ says Tusa, who at 83 is too old to apply for the job. Today editor Sarah Sands is the popular choice to replace retiring Gwyneth Williams.
REFINED luvvie Juliet Stevenson, 62, invited on to Radio 4’s Today programme to mark the spring equinox by reading DH Lawrence’s poem The Enkindled Spring, was asked by host Martha Kearney: ‘Why do you like this so much?’ Stevenson: ‘Erm, actually, you chose it... it’s not my favourite spring poem.’ Cue nervous studio laughter. Cringe!
HARRY and Meghan’s signing of the Christchurch atrocity book of condolence at New Zealand House in Haymarket had some Kiwi observers wondering why the monarch, as Queen of New Zealand, didn’t perform the duty herself. HM was only half a mile away with the Duchess of Cambridge on Tuesday at King’s College on the Strand. The royal website advises that in the Maori language the Queen is known as Kotuku, which means ‘the white heron, a cherished bird rarely seen in New Zealand’. Quite.
SQUEAKER Bercow’s once ubiquitous wife Sally, 49, pictured, made a rare public appearance at Westminster on Tuesday night. It wasn’t in the palatial splendour of Speaker’s House but on a London Underground Jubilee Line platform. She and her half-litre-sized husband boarded a northbound tube with teatime commuters. All change!
ONLY Fools And Horses’ shifty car dealer Boycie, alias John Challis, has signed TV channel Gold’s petition to have a Del Boy statue erected on the site of the Nelson Mandela tower block, location of the fictional Trotters flat in the cult BBC show. Facing demolition, it is actually in refined Ealing, 13 miles away from downat-heel Peckham where the late John Sullivan set the series. Lovely jubbly, as they don’t say in Ealing.
HAS Lord Lamont had a late conversion to the keep-fit vogue? Dazzling in a grey tracksuit and trainers, bon viveur Norman, 76, rendezvoused with a striking personal trainer at Kensington Gardens’ Queen Victoria statute yesterday morning. A fervent supporter of Leave Means Leave, is the former chancellor now a fully signed-up member of the Press-Ups Means Press-Ups movement?
PRINCESS Diana’s publicity-ravenous former butler Paul Burrell, 60, has taken up boxing to shed his pot belly, explaining: ‘It’s excellent cardio exercise. I will lose weight.’ Once Diana’s self-declared rock, Burrell is now more of a jumbo boulder!