Ephraim Hardcastle
WHATEVER the election outcome, it looks set to disrupt the Queen’s Christmas plans, with a scheduled family lunch on December 18 possibly clashing with the State Opening of Parliament. Her annual departure to Sandringham is pencilled in for the following day but that too could be disrupted. HM probably hopes politicians follow the example of the last December poll in 1923 when the State Opening was delayed until January 15.
HUW Edwards announces that he is to front next month’s BBC election coverage, adding that ‘it took 35 BBC years to get there’ – a veiled reference, perhaps, to the Dimbleby family’s hereditary stranglehold on the job until now. Within minutes, his colleague Nick Robinson tweets back uncharitably: ‘But surely you’ve been planning for at least 50.’ Having failed in his bid to get the presenter’s chair on Question Time, green-eyed Nick may have to wait just as long before Edwards calls it a day.
BORN in Hollywood, still gorgeous Stefanie Powers – remembered for TV series Hart to Hart, with Robert Wagner – went to childhood ballet lessons with Natalie Wood and Jill St John. Pictured in her prime, she says: ‘All three of us were later married to Robert Wagner. Natalie was his first wife, I was his TV wife and Jill’s his current wife. Isn’t that crazy?’
JOHN Bercow couldn’t leave his throne without a final bit of meddling, appointing a Speaker’s Chaplain, Tricia Hillas, to replace Rose Hudson-Wilkin. Tricia is currently working at St Paul’s Cathedral – quite a distance from Westminster, where she will trek for daily prayers. Shouldn’t the superannuated Squeaker have left it to his successor to choose the chaplain?
THE Tutankhamun exhibition credits the Daily Mail with first reporting the Mummy’s Curse after Lord Carnarvon – who funded the 1922 discovery of the tomb – died from an infected mosquito bite to his left cheek. Although greeted with raised eyebrows at the time, the Saatchi Gallery exposition confirms that the first autopsy of the 3,000-year-old mummy revealed a healed lesion on King Tut’s cheek – said to be in the same place where Carnarvon was bitten. Spooky.
RECALLING collaborating with Harvey Weinstein during an ill-fated attempt to turn her 1988 novel Girls’ Night Out into a film, saucy authoress Kathy Lette insists he made no advances, saying: ‘I was too old for him... I was 31.’ She adds: ‘If he’d tried that predatory behaviour on me, I’d have used his testicles as maracas.’
MOCKING daft Labour backbencher David Lammy who publicly asks, ‘Is Dominic Cummings a Russian spy?’, Michael Gove responds with a dig at Corbynites, jokily tweeting: ‘Yup! Dom and I are Putin-believing, Stalinapologising, Moscow line friends of anti-western groups like Sinn Fein, Hamas and Hezbollah.’