Ephraim Hardcastle
Wi TH £50million in royal ticket sales lost to Covid, mostly for Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, the Queen has reluctantly abolished the 400-year-old role of Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, held by Desmond Shawe-Taylor since 2005. HM, by nature a traditionalist, has not been entirely deprived of flummery. She still retains a Yeoman Bed Hanger, a Yeoman Bed Goer, Gold Stick-in-Waiting, Clerk of the Closet and the hereditary Grand Carver.
SHAWE-TAYLOR’S most infamous predecessor was Cambridge spy Anthony Blunt. The Queen’s father George VI sent him to Germany in 1945 to discreetly recover documentation claimed to link the Duke of Windsor with Hitler. It’s also believed he retrieved letters written by Prince Philip to his four sisters, who had links to Nazis. All are kept in the Royal Archives under a 100-year embargo. Blunt, despite eventual disgrace, retained the Queen’s favour. She allowed him access to Buckingham Palace to peruse the paintings.
KILLING Eve’s Jodie Comer, pictured, accepted a pittance for Alan Bennett’s revived Talking Heads BBC series last year, agreeing along with the rest of the cast that the money be donated to the NHS. ‘i’m somewhat staggered to find that this amounts to a million pounds,’ an astonished Bennett writes in his london Review of Books diary. And none of the thespians objected to being paid peanuts. Adds Bennett: ‘The financial sacrifice for some of the cast will not be notional. Astonishing though it is, it passes without notice.’
PIMLICO opera founder Wasfi Kani, clearing her throat to object to the singing of Rule Britannia at the Last Night of the Proms, described the popular dirge as a ‘call to imperialism’. She was singing a different tune when the New Year’s Honours came round. She accepted a CBE, one of the highest ranking awards in the Order of the British Empire. Fancy!
AT WESTMINSTER School, Sir Brian Urquhart was scolded by his headmaster in 1937 for laughing at nazi ambassador Rudolf von Ribbentrop delivering his son to the school by Rolls-Royce while two German Embassy chauffeurs saluted, shouting ‘heil Hitler’. Urquhart, an architect of the United nations, who has died aged 101, told the headmaster the nazi Mercedes was painted a plum colour, reserved exclusively for vehicles of the royal family. ‘The headmaster was thunderstruck,’ he recalled. ‘“My dear boy why didn’t you tell me this before?” i was officially regarded as a saviour of national honour, and Von Ribbentrop took to arriving at school just like everyone else.’
ON the 40th anniversary of Court Circular chronicler Tim O’Donovan’s annual royal work league table he confesses that if the Queen had asked him to desist he would have concurred. O’Donovan’s sleuthing is nothing new to HM. As a young princess she would have listened to her grandfather George V ruining a few Christmas Day appetites reading out the list of busiest, and idlest, royals, in figures compiled by his private secretary.