Ephraim Hardcastle
NEW Covid-19 social distancing rules that ban fathers from escorting daughters up the wedding aisle prevent Prince Andrew from giving daughter Beatrice away. But as the wedding to Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi has been postponed indefinitely, the discredited royal might still be able to fulfil his fatherly duty post-pandemic. However, with the Epstein scandal unlikely to go away Andrew might be tempted to stand down, replicating his absence from Bea’s Chiltern Firehouse engagement party last December.
JOHN Major still bristles over Jeremy Paxman pouring scorn on his pro-Europe ‘long shadows, warm beer’ speech, explaining: ‘I was quoting George Orwell from his 1941 essay The Lion And The Unicorn, which I assumed that political commentators would recognise. But they didn’t. Jeremy Paxman, on Newsnight, thought I had taken leave of my senses.’ Considering it’s 27 years ago might Paxo wonder if your senses have gone AWOL, John?
JULIA Roberts, pictured, was underwhelmed when Toby Jones was hired for a minuscule role in Notting Hill: to pester her on the street. ‘She would look at me suspiciously as if, maybe, I shouldn’t be there, so convincing was I as a pest!’ he recalls, adding: ‘I looked so like the kind of pestering fan that people kept throwing me off the set or not allowing me back on.’ Worse: Toby’s performance was left on the cutting room floor.
BLACKADDER’S Tony Robinson credits Jeremy Corbyn for inspiring his children’s show Maid Marian And Her Merry Men, explaining: ‘You’ve got this woman, who is a Utopian who believes she can transform the world, but is surrounded by complete a ******* s. That’s what it was like being in a branch of the Labour Party.’
PINING for Wimbledon, Max Hastings recalls his banter in the Royal Box with celebrities including Katherine Jenkins, Michael McIntyre and Frank Lampard adding: ‘Part of the fun was the serendipity of our fellow guests, who knew nothing about us, while I was often shamefully ignorant about them.’
THE death of Deirdre Bair robs literature of her planned TS Eliot opus. Why did she select Sam Beckett for her first book? ‘I shuffled some index cards into alphabetical order,’ she recalled. ‘Beckett came first, Beckett it shall be, I said to myself, and that was how my life in biography began.’
UNITED Arab Emirates president and Evian water aficionado Sheikh Khalifa was complimented by his late mother, Sheikha Hessa, as they were chauffeured through Richmond Park to his palatial Ham mansion: ‘How kind,’ she said, ‘to allow members of the public to use your garden.’
GERRY Marsden, crooner of Liverpool’s torch song You’ll Never Walk Alone recalls being asked by a US fan to sing ‘the pie song’. Baffled Gerry asked for the opening line: ‘When you walk through a storm / Hold your head a pie’ sang the fan.