Ephraim Hardcastle
NEW Year’s Eve revellers have been deprived of a stern TV Covid warning from National Police Chiefs’ Council chairman Martin Hewitt. The reason? He was locked out of his office. Martin Brunt, peerless Sky News crime correspondent, was waiting to conduct a pooled Microsoft Teams interview when he learned Hewitt would be late arriving at his Victoria HQ. ‘Then I was told he had found the building locked with no-one to let him in,’ says Brunt. ‘The interview was cancelled.’ Might top plod Hewitt be taking social distancing too far?
PRINCE Philip’s ‘troubled’ childhood in Nazi Germany is forensically examined in tomorrow’s Channel 5 documentary The Bachelor Years, chronicling the marriages of all four of his sisters to Hitler supporters before he was 12. It also recalls how life could have been very different for Philip had he remained in Nazi Germany in 1933 at a boarding school owned by his brother-in-law’s family. Says his biographer Philip Eade: ‘He saw a lot of Nazi saluting which struck him as mildly hilarious. It reminded him of boys asking for permission to go to the lavatory!’
ITV political editor Robert Peston displays his trademark excitable gabbiness when describing his ‘stressful’ live report to News at Ten anchor Julie Etchingham, pictured: ‘Line went down. So tried to do on smartphone. Then phone mic didn’t work. Then realised I wasn’t wearing shirt. Then was too late to turn on lights. Then had to hold phone and talk without being able to hear Julie. Never again!’ Surely a contender for It’ll Be Alright on the Night!
LESLEY-ANNE Down, the latest Margaret Thatcher imitator, was paid less than £300 an episode when she appeared in Upstairs Downstairs. Worse, she had to downsize from her King’s Road flat to leasehold accommodation. ‘One of the terms on the lease was that we had to take turns scrubbing the stairs,’ she recalled. ‘When limos would take me home after a premiere, I’d ask them to drop me off half a mile up the street in my evening regalia, so they couldn’t see I was living in low-income housing.’ Isn’t life grand?
FORMER health secretary Jeremy Hunt MP, once head boy at Charterhouse, was upbraided by non-public school Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle for failing to wear a tie when he contributed remotely to a Commons debate. This went down well with Tory MPs in the chamber, who laughed and said ‘hear, hear’. Where did it all go wrong Jeremy?
BEETHOVEN fan James Wood reveals in the latest London Review of Books that the great composer used coded messages to arrange trysts with prostitutes, confiding: ‘The time I prefer most of all is at half past three or four o’clock in the afternoon’. With Covid putting paid to most of Ludwig’s 250th birthday celebrations, maybe the less said about his private life the better.
WITH felicitations and hoping that 2021 is kind to all Hardcastle readers. Happy New Year.