Ephraim Hardcastle
THE Prime Minister is threatened by yet another tell-all book. Having served five months in prison for phone-hacking, ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson – David Cameron’s former Director of Communications – tells friends he’s preparing an autobiography. Such a book might embarrass Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne, the latter having brought Coulson, 47, into No 10 in 2010 as Director of Communications. A friend of Coulson’s tells me: ‘He thinks Cameron let him down badly.’ Coulson’s line is: ‘I am not saying I am and I’m not saying I’m not.’ DAME Joan Collins, 82, announces that she and Elizabeth Hurley, 50, have appeared in a new swimming pool photoshoot for a French magazine, calling it a ‘homage’ to a 1985 Helmut Newton picture of Elizabeth Taylor. A homage? To paraphrase Shakespeare: ‘To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet… is wasteful and ridiculous excess.’ SMITHERS, grovelling lackey of ruthless tycoon Mr Burns in The Simpsons, is outed as a homosexual in the new series. Meanwhile, Burns’s ‘secret girlfriend’, played by actress Jane Fonda, pictured as her character, says her grandchildren were horrified to see her in this role. ‘They said, “No, grandma, it can’t be!”’ PRINCES William and Harry’s visit to Twickenham and the England-Wales game, accompanied by the Duchess of Cambridge, was unofficial. They didn’t have to dress up, go on the pitch to meet teams or use the royal box. My court source says: ‘Pretty handy given that Kate, the future Princess of Wales, hasn’t yet mastered the words of Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (Land Of My Fathers) – the Welsh national anthem.’ WELL-spoken critic Brian Sewell, who has died aged 84, famously debunked the 1994 Tate Britain exhibition of contemporary women artists as ‘a show defiled by feminist claptrap’. Art historian Susan Loppert was one of 35 signatories of a letter of complaint to his editor at the London Evening Standard accusing Sewell of homophobia, misogyny and class hypocrisy. Following his death Ms Loppert, who is in her 60s, writes to The Guardian suggesting that ‘the inevitable triumph of contemporary art’ would have Sewell ‘turning in his bile-filled grave?’ Charming! BITEBACK publisher Iain Dale savages exTory MP Louise Mensch for criticising on Twitter his Cameron biography, Call Me Dave. She pointed out: ‘Dish out pig abuse, you have to take it.’ Dale responds: ‘****. RIGHT. OFF.’ Surely his hopes of becoming a Tory parliamentary candidate – he failed to be selected for Bracknell in 2009 – are dead in the water now. A loss to democracy, if not diplomacy! TART-tongued Strictly Come Dancing judge Craig Revel Horwood predicts that BBC presenter Jeremy Vine will be booted out, adding: ‘He might be 50, darlings, but so am I. So his age is absolutely no excuse for his dreadful dad dancing.’ Quite so.