Ephraim Hardcastle

The BBC’s eagerness to keep the Queen happy could scupper will lewis’s bid to succeed lord hall as director general. Boasting to emily Maitlis about his exposure of the MPs’ expenses scandal, he revealed in a documentary that the Queen had endorsed his investigation by urging him to keep going with his exposure when they met at the Chelsea Flower Show. This breach of royal convention apparently irked HM and could go against will in the crucial interviews.

RUMBLES of Boris’s burgeoning unpopularity from the Isle of Wight, where local businessman Darren Street set up a crowd-funding appeal to buy the PM a £645 pair of Purdey silver duelling cufflinks. Any surplus money raised would go to charity. There wasn’t any. Even a change to a cheaper pair was greeted with ridicule. The whole idea has now been dropped. ROYAL historian hugo Vickers dreads harry and Meghan’s new memoir, predicting it will be a score-settling exercise. It is presumptuously entitled The Making of A Modern royal Family. ‘I look forward to the Private eye spoof – The Unmaking of…,’ he says.

UNHAPPY that the rose once named after her has been ‘discontinued’, perky presenter Anneka rice jokes: ‘what next? Are you going to tell me I’m no longer rear of the Year?’ Ungallant observers note that as Anneka won the award 34 years ago, the citation was probably in latin.

THE late Bill Owen’s Compo from Last Of The Summer Wine is described as disgusting by critic Grace Dent, who adds, sweetly: ‘He is filthy, he is smelly. Yeah he’s basically a tramp, he is a pervert and a tramp!’ Compo may have the last laugh. He’s on the shortlist for Gold’s Greatest Comedy Character, to be screened on Sunday. RADIO 4’s Fi Glover observes that many babies will be given names that reflect the virus pandemic, such as haven or harbour. She retorts: ‘why not call your little darling Social Distancing and be done with it?’

JEREMY Corbyn’s departure from the Labour leadership rendered redundant lookalike Worzel Gummidges. Now the Susan Scott agency seeks a Sir Keir Starmer doppelganger for £1,000-a-time public appearances. Says the agency: ‘Any potential Sir Keirs would need to obviously resemble him and also have a good grasp of English for potential speaking jobs.’ Surely an ideal candidate is Channel 4’s Max Headroom, pictured with Keir. His only drawback is being an artificial intelligence character – though he might pass for Keir at PMQs.