Hardcastle Ephraim
THERE will be no pomp or procession when Royal Ascot is held behind closed doors next month. But a slight bending of the proposed model allowing horse owners to attend would enable the Queen to make a short, well-distanced appearance. She has two runners listed and her low-key appearance would have the dual purpose of showing her out and about and keeping intact her record of never missing the event.
THE sacrificing of Royal Ascot’s pomp to Covid-19 will surely prompt the late clerk of the course, Sir Gordon Carter, to spin in his grave. Thirty-one years in charge until his death in 1941, Gordon changed his clothes five times a day and had his shoelaces washed and ironed overnight. Makes Prince Charles, who only reportedly has them ironed, look a bit slapdash.
BBC Breakfast editor Richard Frediani, triumphantly tweets: ‘More than 11million viewers watching every week makes BBC Breakfast the number one show.’ his boast follows weekend reports that his arrival from ITV coincided with an ‘intimidating and bullying’ culture. If only his staff felt so chipper.
JOURNALIST Flora Gill, pictured with her mother Amber Rudd, mischievously tweets of a lockdown video chat with the former Cabinet minister: ‘How worried should I be that over a 40-minute conversation with Mum at 11am on a Wednesday, she got through two cans of cocktails?’ Whatever happened to a daughter’s discretion!
DeSPITe a huge public petition, Colonel Tom Moore’s anticipated knighthood has been delayed indefinitely with the postponement of next month’s Queen’s Birthday honours List. Ironically, Bob Geldof – who raised roughly the same amount as Tom with Live Aid – received an honorary knighthood within a year. And he is still a lot younger than the Colonel.
PRINCE Charles might envy Colonel Tom being made a City of London Freeman. There’s no progress on HRH’s hopes of a similar honour from Aberdeen. The Lord Provost, Barney Crockett, has been lobbying local councillors to support the idea but, with the pandemic, his timing couldn’t be worse.It will be a while before Charles joins the other royals honoured: Prince Albert (1848), Edward VII (1866) and the Queen Mother (1959).
The lockdown stand-off between Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon decrees that the Queen is permitted to motor as far as hadrian’s Wall but her son Charles, still in isolation at Birkhall on Royal Deeside, is forbidden from travelling southwards and waving at his Mum from the other side of the bulwark.