Ephraim Hardcastle
AS Charles and Camilla mark their tenth wedding anniversary at Birkhall, why no honour for the aide whose canny advice helped make them more popular – the Prince of Wales’s ex-deputy private secretary, Mark Bolland, 49? When he began working for Charles in 1996, the prince’s approval ratings were a modest 20 per cent. They had risen to 75 per cent by the time he left in 2002. A source says: ‘Charles wanted him to have a CVO (Commander of the Royal Victorian Order) but it was blocked. Sir Michael Peat (the then private secretary) is blamed but it would have been the Queen’s decision. They didn’t like being forced to accept Camilla.’ Meanwhile, former Eton fag Sir Michael bagged a string of gongs – a CVO, KCVO and, finally, a GCVO. PROMOTING a documentary about her late father, the cultish Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who killed himself, aged 27, in 1994, Frances Bean Cobain, 22, pictured as a baby with her parents, says: ‘I don’t really like Nirvana that much. The grunge scene is not what I’m interested in.’ An unusual approach to product promotion but not unwelcome. LAST year, Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman criticised Gordon Brown for denying her the post of deputy prime minister because of her gender. Now she tells the Left Wing journal, Fabian Review: ‘I’m now shadow deputy prime minister. So it’s two steps forward, one step back. Obviously I’ve reflected on the situation... but it is the prime minister’s fiat.’ My dictionary defines ‘fiat’ as ‘an authoritative and often arbitrary command…’ APROPOS my note about Sir Malcolm Rifkind missing out on a peerage after his ‘lobbying’ exposure, his journalist son, Hugo, hasn’t helped matters by referring to the Royal Family in The Times last month as our ‘loyal but dim pets’. My source says: ‘Sir Malcolm, as a Scot, would have been in line for the Order of the Thistle, which is in HM’s personal gift, but that may now have evaporated. Son Hugo’s remark didn’t go un-noticed by courtiers.’ EX Tory whip Baroness Trumpington, 92, a veteran of the Bletchley Park wartime decoding centre, owns a painting of Windsor she bought for only £5. The Queen Mother admired it on a visit to the Trumpington schloss, its chatelaine tells Country Life, adding: ‘I replied: “I suppose I ought to give it to you – but I’m not going to.”’ No decoding required! TORY peeress Baroness Brady, 46, says the Queen once asked her how she’d managed to run a football club, sit on three boards, work with charities, write columns, appear on The Apprentice and bring up two children. Her ladyship replied: ‘When you want something done, you ask a busy woman.’ HM, she says, ‘smiled knowingly.’ A memorable moment for Karren Brady. As their 23-year-old managing director, boarding (Championship League) Birmingham FC’s team bus, she was once greeted by a player’s rude cry, ‘I can see your t**s.’ Quick-witted Karren told him: ‘When I sell you to (Division Three) Crewe, you won’t see them from there.’