Ephraim Hardcastle
WITH the Crown Estate owning the rights to most UK seabeds, enjoying a growing income from energy companies for the location of wind turbines, Prince Charles has an understandable keenness for the controversial electricity generators. Last year he officially opened Scotland’s largest wind farm just off the Caithness coast near Wick. But is his enthusiasm shared by Prince Philip? Hardly. Before his retirement, meeting a wind turbine operator at a Buckingham Palace reception, the duke raged: ‘They’re absolutely useless, completely reliant on subsidies and an absolute disgrace.’ Arguing back that they were costeffective and ‘the future’, the hapless operative was asked by Philip: ‘You don’t believe in fairy tales do you?’
DOMINIC Raab took the oath of office as Foreign Secretary during Wednesday’s telephone Council with the Queen at Balmoral. According to the Court Circular, he also kissed hands with the monarch. Unless Dominic has acquired Saint Padre Pio’s gift of bilocation, isn’t it time the Circular was ushered into the 21st century?
KEIR Starmer was a ‘near-Bolshevik bruiser’ at Reigate Grammar School, according to his fellow pupil, Right-wing commentator Andrew Sullivan. Describing the adolescent Labour leader in The Spectator, Sullivan writes: ‘[He had] a Bay City Rollers haircut, a fat tie, an unbuttoned collar and an air of real roughness.’ Where did it all go wrong, Keir?
JOELY Richardson, pictured, plays a British astronaut in Paul Anderson’s 1997 sci-fi movie Event Horizon, which is being reincarnated as a TV series by Amazon. Richardson wears an EU flag rather than a Union Jack on her space suit – she surely qualifies historically as the first Remainer, opposing Brexit 23 years before the event.
WILL Harry and Meghan be seeking guidance on their Netflix productions from Uncle Edward? Unlikely. When he ran Ardent Productions, Edward attempted to interview an elderly German gent who had witnessed his great-uncle Edward VIII’s meeting with Hitler. When it became clear the out-of-his depth Edward was getting nowhere, producer Christine Carter stopped the interview, recalling: ‘I said to Edward, “What did the Duke of Windsor say to Hitler?” Edward said, “Chris, you’d better do this interview.”’ Ardent was put out of its misery in 2009.
MARTHA Kearney initiates a Radio 4 Today contest to find a woke joke after John Cleese complains that PC obsessives are unfunny. But hasn’t Cleese’s tickling stick been AWOL since before the millennium?
GABBY socialite Kathy Lette tweets irately: ‘To the ratbag who stole my cycle, I spent years moulding that bike seat to my own sweet shape. It gave a very intimate meaning to “bespoke”. Well, I just hope it gets your nuts in a knot.’ So far removed from John Betjeman’s gentle couplet: ‘I sometimes think that I should like / To be the saddle of a bike.’