Ephraim Hardcastle
COULD Tony Abbott fulfil his ambition to be knighted by the Queen? The colourful trade envoy would raise no objection if Hm were reminded of his restoration, as Australian Pm, of the order of Australia, knighting Prince Philip in 2015 just before losing the election. The Queen was pleased. And Tony doesn’t need to jog her memory that Australians can still accept British honours. When her only ever Australian private secretary, Sir William Heseltine, retired in 1990 she gave him the Royal Victorian order.
PLANS to celebrate next month’s centenary of the birth of Dick Francis, the Queen Mother’s favourite jockey, have been scuppered by Covid-19. The erection of a £100,000 bronze statue has been postponed at Aintree, where Dick and the QM’s horse Devon Loch fell within sight of the winning post in 1956. And son Felix’s equine whodunnit, Iced, due out this week, has been postponed. ‘It is very disappointing,’ says Felix. no post-holiday rose petals sprinkled before BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg, pictured. Curiously thatched Tory mP michael Fabricant compares her to Dad’s Army’s pessimistic Private Frazer, tweeting: ‘oh nooooooo! After a few weeks of bliss, the Gloomsberg is back. It’s just the way she says it. Doomed!’
EX-BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond recalls the Diana-Fergie rivalry in a Channel 5 documentary, saying: ‘I got a phone call from the BBC early in the morning and they said, “Jen we need you in the office, you won’t believe this but Fergie has been found having her toes sucked by her financial adviser in the South of France!”’ Surely sufficient to put Jennie off her Coco Pops!
DECCA mitford has been outed as a shoplifter by biographer Selina Hastings, who was asked to distract a shop assistant when they visited a King’s Road stationer in the 80s. ‘As I did so, I saw her out of the corner of my eye, quietly sliding sheets of wrapping paper into her handbag,’ recalls Selina, adding that first husband, fellow socialist Esmond Romilly, was similarily inclined. ‘The two of them stole from the grand country houses to which they occasionally managed to wangle an invitation to stay.’
IS Fiona Bruce enduring a midlife crisis? She tells Radio Times: ‘I’m 56 and I didn’t expect to be working at this age.’ Fiona, take heart: Agatha Christie, married to archaeologist Max Mallowan, who was 13 years her junior, declared: ‘The older I get the more interested he is.’ And surely presenting Antiques Roadshow, the older you are the more valuable.
BANISHED royal governess marion Crawford, the subject of a new book by Wendy Holden, might spin in her grave at the contrast in the Queen’s lavish endorsement of books by her dresser Angela Kelly compared to Crawfie’s The Little Princesses. Hm instructed the Royal Collection to publicise miss Kelly’s Dressing the Queen, making it available in all royal souvenir shops. Short of signing copies, could the Queen have done more for her bespoke costumier?