Ephraim Hardcastle
THE Daily Telegraph’s always newsworthy former boss Conrad Black has been entertaining the Cliveden Literary Festival set. Quizzed about his time in a US jail after being convicted of fraud, he replied: ‘I was not in jail! Jail is where they put the town drunk. I was in prison.’
ALSO at Cliveden, exTory MP Hugo Swire’s wife Sasha, who wrote entertaining diaries about life in David Cameron’s set, denied they had anything to do with sex. ‘Yes they do,’ panel chairman Andrew Roberts interjected. ‘Just turn to page 125 and 126,’ added the small-in-stature historian, pictured. Mrs Swire changed the subject. I have checked pages 125 and 126 of Diary Of An MP’s Wife. ‘At George Osborne’s birthday party,’ writes Sasha, ‘Dave and H (her husband) are laughing uproariously... talking about male members, notably Andrew Roberts’s. He says he knows someone who, having witnessed it unfurl, was still in recovery. He then goes on to Michael Gove’s – apparently his is pretty impressive, too. Rather like a slinky that comes down the stairs before the rest of the body. Dave thinks this is hilarious.’ A reliable guide to what senior Tories talk about in private?
COCKY Nick Robinson, from BBC Radio 4, seems relaxed about the controversy caused by him rudely telling the Prime Minister on air to ‘stop talking’. While debating the merits of the Victorians and Georgians with aforementioned historian Andrew Roberts, he piped up: ‘I would never dare say to you, Andrew, “Stop talking!”’ Would he have said it to Boris Johnson if the BBC hadn’t possessed a spineless senior management?
DUNDEE-born Brian Cox, star of the TV smash hit Succession, plays a powerful media tycoon who rarely hears the word ‘No’ in his daily dealings. So is it undiplomatic of him to tell The Irish Times: ‘My great-grandfather came from Derry. My great-grandmother came from Donegal. My only quarrel with the Irish is that they would have their throat cut rather than say ‘No’ to you. An Irish person will always try and help with directions even if they have no real handle on the desired location. When going to Scotland, my ancestors had to learn the word “No”.’
READER’S Digest carries ‘celebrity’ extracts from a new book, A Portrait Of The Tree, including this passage about Osborne House on the Isle of Wight by Alan Titchmarsh: ‘If you walk down the steps to the broad terrace in front of the house and turn to your right, passing underneath a wooden pergola, you will find in the centre of a flowerbed a towering specimen of the Chusan palm, Trachycarpus fortunei. It was planted by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to celebrate the centenary of the garden being opened to the public. The Queen had an assistant in the operation. Me. Well, to be honest, and without impugning Her Majesty’s horticultural prowess, I did the lion’s share of the work as she looked on. Quite right, too. It is a magical place, and our tree – Her Majesty’s and mine – is really rather special.’ No hiding his light under a bushel for Mr Titchmarsh.