Ephraim Hardcastle
WILL Prince Charles welcome the ending of EU farm subsidies? Now overseeing his mother’s farming interests at Sandringham, he’ll have been gratified by the £3million received from Brussels in the past five years, including a record £935,908 last year. And the environmentally friendly Charles should be delighted by the replacement of EU gravy with payments encouraging sustainable developments and conservation projects. As one royal retainer observes: ‘The Government’s new plans could almost have been written by the royal farmer-in-chief himself.’
MENTAL health minister Nadine Dorries provides her recipe for the Covid meal debate, tweeting: ‘To make a scotch egg taste even better, bite a small hole in the top, squirt and fill with salad cream. Eat. You’re welcome.’ Seven minutes later the tweet was deleted. Did Nigella complain?
MATILDA De Angelis, pictured, elicited sympathy from Hugh Grant while rehearsing the scene where she is bludgeoned to death in HBO whodunnit The Undoing. ‘It could not have been more awkward,’ he recalls. ‘This poor Italian actress, the first thing she has to do in America is kiss an old man and then be beaten to death.’ It’s only telly, Hugh!
DID Helena Bonham Carter, alias The Crown’s Princess Margaret, consult a psychic before urging Peter Morgan to label his royal excitement a drama rather than historical fact? Last year she claimed to have contacted the deceased Margaret to ask for her approval. ‘Are you OK with me playing you?’ she asked. ‘You’re better than the other actress,’ Margaret apparently replied.
FATHER Ted writer Graham Linehan pays tribute, in The Spectator, to Griff Rhys Jones, Ben Miller and Alexander Armstrong for answering his plea for signatures to a letter defending JK Rowling. ‘David Walliams, who achieved fame partly because I attached myself to the pilot of Little Britain, didn’t respond to my emails,’ he adds. Miaow!
RECALLING her attempt at a festive Nativity play for her young son Danny Kruger – now an MP – Prue Leith says she ambitiously introduced two donkeys to the stable. ‘One of them ate the crib and very nearly ate the baby Jesus who was made from straw,’ Prue ruefully remembers.
MARGARET Thatcher’s private secretary Charles Powell confirms her antagonism towards former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing, saying she found him ‘patronising and condescending’. He told Radio 4: ‘When he was retired and she was still Prime Minister she would see him when he asked to see her... though, I usually had to push her quite hard!’
MEGHAN Markle wasn’t asked to guest edit Radio 4’s Today show this Christmas despite husband Harry’s successful stint in 2017. Then editor Sarah Sands cheekily asked Harry if he could persuade the Queen to provide the daily horse racing tips. If he’d agreed, Today listeners might have been gifted that rarity: a winner.