Ephraim Hardcastle
THE Queen, beleaguered by son Andrew’s relationship with Epstein and paedophile claims against Lord Mountbatten, would have welcomed the morale-boosting presence of Mountbatten’s grandson in this week’s BBC documentary about the 1979 murder. Timothy Knatchbull, then 14, survived the IRA attack, and, arriving at Balmoral at 3am, was comforted by the Queen ‘sort of steaming up the corridor at us’. He recalls: ‘It had that sort of feeling of a mother duck gathering up her lost young, a total look of care and concern on her face wrapping us up in a sort of motherliness.’
APROPOS Mountbatten, the new oldie magazine describes his last days at his Hampshire home Broadlands, noting: ‘He had sets of Barbara Cartland’s books which he read. He read nothing else much.’
NEW York columnist Cindy Adams claims that Harry and Meghan will be ‘banished’ to Africa, just like the Duke of Windsor and his American divorcee wife Wallis Simpson who were packed off to the Bahamas in WW2. ‘The message is that Meghan is not liked in palace circles,’ says Cindy, who claims to have her ear to the ground despite being 3,500 miles from Frogmore.
NIGELLA Lawson, pictured, apologises after excitedly plugging the merits of central London restaurant Flor, whose anchovy toast she’d described as ‘the best thing to eat in any restaurant in London’. Within hours, she tweets: ‘Actually, feel bad about saying that now... I don’t actually believe in rankings of that sort, and I don’t mean to disparage other dishes and other restaurants I love.’ The Domestic Goddess’s mansion contains many tables.
BRIGHT Lights, Big City scribe Jay McInerney suffers a sense of humour failure when millionaire Greek socialite Taki visits him at the ‘gigantic’ New York country pile he shares with wife Anne Hearst, one of the richest women in the US. Taki recalls in The Spectator: ‘When I asked Jay which of his books had earned enough to build such a mansion he didn’t find it at all funny.’
NIGEL Farage, newly ensconced in a twobedroom roost in Dolphin Square, is under siege from the predominantly wellheeled, elderly, female residents who monopolise the park benches near the exit. Says my source: ‘Nigel has found that if you say hello to them, that’s it, you’ll never get away. He’s taken to having his black Range Rover backed up to the main door of his block where minders bundle him in and out at top speed.’
JENNIFER Saunders has outed her friend Dolly Parton as a tattoo aficionado, disclosing on Australian TV: ‘She literally just opened her top. And she wasn’t wearing a bra. They were the most beautiful angels and beautiful butterflies and baskets of flowers in pastel-coloured tattoos.’ But nowhere, under Dolly’s jumbo frontage, was there any sign of Carl, her reclusive husband of 53 years.