Ephraim Hardcastle

ASKING the Queen for an interview, John Humphrys received a blunt refusal. He should have known better. She doesn’t submit to interviews, preferring ‘conversations’. Last year, she chatted with Alastair Bruce about her 1953 coronation. He wasn’t allowed to ask questions – just make observations. But even if Humphrys had requested ‘a conversation’, HM would have declined. She made it clear that if she ever did change her mind, the retired BBC interrogator wouldn’t be asking the questions. CAMILLA’S ex, Andrew Parker Bowles, recalls his first meeting with Lucian Freud in 1983, when, as Commanding Officer of the Household Cavalry he provided a horse for the artist to paint. ‘When he finished, he gave the trooper holding the horse a sketch,’ he tells Tatler, adding that Freud advised him to sell it. ‘With the money, the trooper bought a house. I got nothing.’ FREUD spent 18 months painting a 7ft portrait of Parker Bowles in his uniform (it sold for £21million at Christie’s in 2015). And when APB complained of being too tubby in the unfinished canvas, Lucian gleefully painted an extra inch of fat on his tummy. ‘He did it,’ recalls Andrew, ‘to shut me up’. COLEEN Rooney, pictured, and her outing of Rebekah Vardy as the alleged leaker of stories about her prompts Tory MP Greg Hands to tweet: ‘Give Coleen a job in the Government Whips’ office!’ NATIONALIST MSP Jenny Gilruth is unlikely to forget the moment she revealed to her family that she was gay. ‘I told my mum I was going out with the leader of a political party,’ she tweeted. Her partner was then Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale but her mum guessed it was Lib Dem chief Willie Rennie. Mr Rennie tweeted that he ‘loved’ the disclosure. Maybe he was simply pleased a voter knew his name. LADY Antonia Fraser tells The Oldie that her uncle, painter Henry Lamb, disliked her as a teenager, saying: ‘He believed me to be pleasure bent with my lipstick, Pink Plum Beautiful – well, he got that right.’ Oh, stop it missus! MICHAEL Parkinson tells Australian TV he would be tempted out of retirement for a Donald Trump interview, saying: ‘No journalist worth his salt would not want a sit down interview with Trump to find out why he is such a ridiculous man. He is impenetrable in his idiocy.’ PRINCESS Margaret’s friend Lady Glenconner was asked by The Crown’s Helena Bonham Carter to describe the Princess’s smoking habit, unaware that delightfully daft Helena was also consulting a medium. ‘She asked how the Princess had smoked,’ says her Ladyship. ‘I described it as rather like a Chinese tea ceremony.’ Unlike Mags, Anne Glenconner is very much alive.