Ephraim Hardcastle
COMMENCING his 100th year tomorrow, Prince Philip’s insistence that he doesn’t want any ballyhoo was reflected in his remarks when the Queen Mother celebrated her centenary in 2000. ‘I have no desire whatsoever to reach the same age,’ he insisted. ‘I can’t imagine anything worse. Bits of me are falling off already.’ Happy birthday, HRH!
ANTI-monarchist former Lib Dem MP Norman Baker rails against the Privy Council in an interview with the royal-bashing Republic movement. No mention of his own promotion to the council, when he happily knelt before the Queen, kissed hands and pledged loyalty. Why doesn’t he resign?
WHAT will Charles Dickens’s disciples, marking the 150th anniversary of his death today, make of writer AN Wilson’s new supposition that the author contracted venereal disease from a London prostitute? In The Mystery of Charles Dickens, Wilson suggests Dickens might have been infected in 1856 before his 15-year affair with actress Nelly Ternan. ‘If Dickens did have the clap,’ writes Wilson, ‘it would have complicated his hopes of a relationship with Nelly.’
A LOCKDOWN spoof of 1930 painting American Gothic by the BBC’s John Beattie and Laura Millar drew a snooty review from SNP culture poobah Fiona Hyslop. She responded to the Twitter image, below,
JOHN Cleese, jaded by his late mother Muriel’s complaints that she didn’t want to go on living, says he threatened to send a hitman, explaining: ‘From then on, if she started telling me she was a bit depressed, I would listen for a couple of minutes and I was like, “So shall I call the little man who lives down the road?” and she would go, “Oh no, I have got a sherry party on Friday. I don’t want to miss that.”’ Mrs Cleese died in 2000 aged 101.
ROWING with Piers Morgan about foxes murdering her chickens, Sky’s Kay Burley tweets: ‘Like you with politicians, they kill for satisfaction.’ But isn’t Kay more annoyed by her dismal Sky breakfast viewing figures of 90,000 compared with Piers’s GMB 875,000?
USING a transcription app to cover one of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street press conferences, a political commentator was bemused when the PM’s remark: ‘Let’s go to Beth Rigby, Sky News’ was translated as: ‘Let’s go to bed. Three beers. Good news.’