Ephraim Hardcastle
SHE is patron of Gibraltar’s Literary Festival, but Princess Anne’s invitation to the event in November might test Boris Johnson’s bulldog spirit against the Spanish, who threaten retaliation if she accepts. Her 2016 visit was scuppered by the Brexit referendum. The Gibraltarians desperately want her to reinforce their Britishness. How will the Spanish react? Their royals were banned from Charles and Diana’s wedding because the couple chose to begin their honeymoon on the Rock. And Edward and Sophie’s 2012 visit prompted Madrid to veto Queen Sofia’s attendance at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
DIEHARD Labourite rocker Mick Hucknall describes Jeremy Corbyn as ‘spineless and cowardly’, adding: ‘I could never back Corbyn – he’s not fit to lead this country. And the same goes for John McDonnell and Diane Abbott.’ Can the Simply Red warbler be henceforth described as ‘Simply’?
ANDREW Neil, who grilled both Tory leadership hopefuls, reveals: ‘I read that my interviews with Messrs Hunt and Johnson generated 179 complaints to the BBC alleging bias against one, or other, or both.’ He adds: ‘I can understand that. My approach, broadly, is to be biased against whoever I’m interviewing.’
JOHN Cleese’s comedian daughter Camilla, 35, pictured, mischievously claims to have learnt the facts of life from a comedy sex scene in her father’s 1983 Monty Python film The Meaning of Life, explaining: ‘That’s how I learnt about sex – no birds and bees talk.’
BOOSTERISM, Boris Johnson’s description of his optimistic economic policies, as revealed by the Mail, originates in remote Duluth in Minnesota where investment was sought for a new railway with far-fetched claims. It described itself as ‘a place of untold delights, a terrestrial paradise, fanned by the balmy zephyrs of an eternal spring, with mines of gold, immeasurable veins of silver’. Boris could have penned that!
AWAITING heart surgery, Sir Michael Palin is already planning a post-op excursion on the Greater Anglian locomotive named in his honour, explaining: ‘I have travelled on the Delia Smith. So I can say that I have sat on Delia Smith all the way to Lowestoft.’
DISCUSSING snacks for Ascot, the Queen confides to a flunkey her love for taramasalata, the Greek dish of cod’s roe. Does her Hellenic-born husband Philip share her passion? He was banished from Greece as a child.
COUNTRYFILE presenter John Craven’s long career got off to a false start. ‘At 18 I’d been “spotted” by an ITV youth programme because I ran our church magazine,’ he says. ‘But after only a few appearances I was sacked – because I was too old!’