Ephraim Hardcastle
LORD Mountbatten’s diaries – kept secret for fear of compromising the ‘dignity’ of the Queen – are not the only royal documents withheld by the National Archive, with details of Charles and Camilla’s register office marriage confidential until after Charles’s death and Andrew’s flying training embargoed until 2066. Held indefinitely is correspondence from various PMs over the career of the Duke of York. Hardly an echo of the Duke of Wellington’s ‘publish and be damned’, but with nothing to hide why not blow the dust off and release the files?
TWO years before she met Harry, Meghan wrote of her father Thomas in her blog The Tig: ‘The blood, sweat and tears this man (who came from so little in a small town of Pennsylvania...) invested in my future so I could grow up to have so much,’ adding: ‘To my dad – my thoughtful, inspiring, hard-working Daddy – Happy Father’s Day.’ With their relationship plumbing sub-Arctic degrees of frostiness, might Meghan consider reviving the now defunct blog to help restore familial harmony?
ASSEMBLING The Beatles film Get Back, Peter Jackson had a eureka moment over the grainy 52-year-old footage of the Fab Four. Recalling how he converted blackand-white film of World War I soldiers into vivid colour for his 2018 film, he tells Radio Times: ‘We were able to scan the 16mm footage and put it through the same pipeline we used for They Shall Not Grow Old and suddenly it looks much cheerier, much brighter.’ A Magical Mystery Tour, Peter?
DOWNTON Abbey star Joanne Froggatt, pictured, recalls the Duchess of Cambridge visiting Lady Mary’s bedroom during filming and remarking how strange it was to be there. ‘I said, “Yes not many people get to come in Lady Mary’s bedroom... And then I just stopped and I could see a twinkle in Kate’s eye. I thought, “Jo, stop talking.” That was one of my good foot-in-the-mouth moments.’
THERE was only minimum outrage when Max Mosley’s fascist dad Oswald accepted an invitation in 1960 from Oxford Union president Peter Jay to oppose the motion that ‘South Africa’s racial policies are incompatible with membership of the Commonwealth’. After the motion was carried Peter, later PM Jim Callaghan’s Washington ambassador, was unnerved by Mosley at post-debate drinks. ‘I had a physical sensation of being towed away from my mental moorings,’ he recalls. ‘He was hypnotic. I had to break free.’
RARELY a dull moment for Lady Glenconner as Princess Margaret’s ladyin-waiting, recalling her husband Colin Tennant being denied access to first class on a flight from the South Pacific. ‘I could hear the most terrible noise going on, screaming and shouting,’ she says. ‘I said to Princess Margaret, “I’d better go and see.” She said, ‘No Anne, sit down!” To my horror, out of the window I then saw Colin being dragged off the aeroplane. I said to Margaret, “I must go after him!” Margaret just pulled the blind down and that was that.” It was four days before the Glenconners were reunited.