Hardcastle
HIgHLIgHTINg Prince Philip’s green credentials at Cop26, the Queen diplomatically glosses over another aspect of his environmental record – his enthusiasm for shooting, including the dispatch of a tiger in India in 1961. He also shot boars, stags, rabbits, a crocodile and at least 30,000 pheasants. Charles, William and Harry have inherited his love of the rifle, with the brothers once regular visitors to the duke of Westminster’s hunting estate in Cordoba, Spain, where boars are the speciality. Few noticed former Spanish king Juan Carlos slipping off to Botswana to shoot elephants until he smashed his hip. Our royals don’t want too much attention focused on lethal country pursuits.
PRINCE Philip’s shooting prowess pales beside that of the Queen’s grandfather George V. On a ten-day hunt in Nepal in 1911 he helped bag 39 tigers, 18 rhinoceroses, four bears and uncounted porcupines, leopards, birds and other game. He knighted the organiser, the Nepalese prime minister who had tied up hundreds of elephants and buffaloes to lure tigers in the way of the king’s guns. Presented with a rhinoceros as a memento of his trip, he gave it to London Zoo. Lucky rhino!
PAuL McCartney, in his Bible-sized memoir The Lyrics, writes extensively about girlfriend Jane Asher and spouses Linda and Nancy. Yet there is not a single mention of Heather Mills, pictured. She was his second wife and trousered £24.3million in a bitter 2008 divorce settlement.
IN the book, Macca analyses his haunting song Eleanor Rigby, recalling the influence of Bernard Herrmann, writer of the music for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. ‘There’s some kind of madcap connection between Eleanor Rigby, an elderly woman left high and dry, and the mummified mother in Psycho,’ Macca tells The New Yorker.
LAMENTINg current bias on BBC News, former Panorama reporter Tom Mangold recalls the official fury when, reporting from Vietnam on a uS air strike on a village that killed women and children, he concluded on air: ‘Military historians may one day question the wisdom of these tactics.’ He remembers: ‘On my return to London my deputy editor told me that I had been fired for inserting even that one line of comment, and he had had to fight to keep me on. The line between total impartiality and comment has blurred almost beyond repair at BBC News.’
MEANWHILE retired foreign correspondent Martin Bell describes BBC coverage as ‘lopsided’. ‘This includes BBC1’s Six O’Clock News, which has come to resemble an extended medical bulletin, with space reserved in the second half for campaigns by sectional interests,’ wails the man in the white suit.
POLEMICIST Jonathan Meades reaches for his thesaurus to insult Boris: ‘A cruel mendacious antinomian narcissist, an aspirant dictator who revels in destruction,’ he writes sweetly in The Critic. ‘The oaf’s only creation is a shivering, starving bedlam hidden by a policy of coarse populism, formerly trading as bread and circuses.’ Surely the PM speaks highly of you Jonners!