Ephraim Hardcastle

EMMANUEL Macron’s fingers remain crossed that the Queen will grant him a video audience in lieu of his cancelled trip next month to present London with the Legion d’Honneur. But in betting terms it’s still a long shot. All Boris’s lockdown audiences have been via telephone. Ditto meetings with Canada’s Justin Trudeau, Australia’s Scott Morrison and New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern. She did make royal history conducting one Privy Council gettogether by video. But last week’s council pow wow was by phone.

THE BBC staging of Last Night of the Proms in an empty Royal Albert Hall will not be sufficient to assuage chief executive Craig Hassall’s fears of closure. And it’s grim news for the owners of the 1,268 seats which can be rented out for up to £2,500 for the event, with a Grand Tier box valued at £3million. That was pre-pandemic.

BENEDICT Cumberbatch won’t be reprising his turn as Dominic Cummings in TV’s Brexit: The Uncivil War, as writer James Graham explains: ‘I think the journalists are doing this better than dramatists could do it.’

CORNISH scone aficionados, throwing their cream teas out of the pram after the Queen’s bakers favoured the Devonian method, should have been warned when Claire Foy, pictured, playing HM in The Crown, served tea to Jodi Balfour’s Jacqueline Kennedy. Claire clearly places the cream on before the jam, sending Devon’s bun makers into rhapsody.

PIERS Morgan tweets: ‘Seeing very little support for Emily Maitlis from high-profile BBC stars. Cat got your cowardly tongues?’ Emily is what Dominic will never be: One of Piers’s VBFs.

BOND screenwriter Bruce Feirstein muses on Harry and Meghan’s fate in Los Angeles: ‘Each day brings us closer to that night when Harry and Meghan – without real money and without a real portfolio – find themselves invited to a celebratory dinner at the Chateau Marmont, seated a bit below the salt, dress extras at somebody else’s film premiere. Dystopian?’

TOM Jones’s biographer Colin MacFarlane, marking the Welsh warbler’s 80th birthday next month, explains why Tom couldn’t celebrate the breakthrough success of It’s Not Unusual in 1965 with his former drinking buddies in Pontypridd. ‘I can’t go back to my old local pub or club,’ wailed Tom. ‘Because if I do everyone expects me to buy them a pint. If I do they call me a flash Harry and if I don’t they call me a skinflint. You just can’t win.’

PARTY animal Alan Carr nostalgically recalls his drunken pre-pandemic revels at Mayfair’s Arts Club: ‘I’d lost my specs and I heard this posh voice say, “Where are your glasses?” I thought, “Christ, I recognise that face and that ginger hair – it’s Mick Hucknall.” It was Prince Harry.’ Email: john.mcentee@dailymail.co.uk