Ephraim Hardcastle
TONY Blair’s former flatmate Lord Falconer leads the Labour charge against Boris, accusing him of breaking international law in the Brexit talks. Has the ex-Lord Chancellor forgotten how, in 2003, he claimed to have helped persuade Blair’s attorney general Lord Goldsmith to make a last-minute U-turn on his ruling that the iraq war was illegal? Charlie Falconer and fellow Labour crony Sally Morgan ‘more or less pinned [him] to the wall’ in a Downing Street showdown. Sanctimonious Charlie boasts of memorising every B-side to singles released in the 1960s, but seems to have forgotten the night he claims to have tried to persuade Goldsmith to about-face over iraq – something Goldsmith has always denied.
EMILY Bendell, the purveyor of women’s frillies making a legal bid to join the allmale Garrick Club, fails to gain Jilly Cooper’s endorsement. ‘Women have their own all-female clubs,’ says Jilly, whose late husband Leo was a stalwart of the Covent Garden watering hole. ‘I enjoyed being taken for lovely lunches and dinners there. If I was a member I would have had to pay for them. Much as I love my own sex, I don’t believe women should be allowed join the Garrick.’
MEANWHILE, salmon-and-cucumber tie wearers have been adjourning to the club’s Pinero room, where laptops are permitted, to discreetly peruse the alluring lingerie on emily’s Bluebella website. One confused habituee inquired in the cocktail bar: ‘What’s a double waistbanded thong?’
NORMAL People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones, pictured, relied for early career advice on her father Philip, the Sky Arts boss and former executive director of Big Brother. ‘He was good at [saying], “Keep your head screwed on and keep your feet on the floor”,’ she says. Currently she has her feet firmly on Dad’s carpet, having moved in between filming assignments. Is he delighted? ‘She’s eating me out of house and home,’ he wails.
PLAYWRIGHT Ronald Harwood, who has died aged 85, imposed a ban on women playing the men’s roles in all his works including The Dresser, which variously starred Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney, ian McKellen and Anthony Hopkins. He stipulated that the veto could be lifted when his copyright lapsed, 75 years after his death, adding: ‘Then they can do what they like.’
MISHAL Husain blatantly retains BBC Radio 4 Today’s bias, yesterday failing to challenge Jane Fonda’s description of Extinction Rebellion’s blockade of printing presses as ‘understandable’ and her comment: ‘It’s all fake news.’ Fingers crossed new DG Tim ‘Tigger’ Davie was listening rather than ironing his denims.
FORMER attorney general Dominic Grieve, in a BBC interview on Brexit, uses the phrase ‘sold down the river’. isn’t he aware the BBC now deems this phrase racist and has banned sports commentators from using it? Dom will never get a job reporting on the boat race.