Ephraim Hardcastle

THE Queen visits Wales today to open the Welsh Assembly – a task some courtiers thought she might delegate to the Prince of Wales, who’ll be following in her wake. His 1969 investiture provided HM with one of the worst few days in her long reign. Welsh Nationalists were setting off bombs to protest and the event became so stressful that the monarch returned to London and took to bed for a week with a cold. Some years later palace officials admitted that she had been suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion’ – the only recorded instance of it in her 64-year reign. BOBBY Charlton revisits the dispute over his team-mate Geoff Hurst’s controversial goal against Germany 50 years ago. In his new book, 1966: My World Cup Story, he writes: ‘Down the years, and after close inspection of film evidence, I have come to accept it was maybe not legitimate.’ What a morale booster for England on the eve of the Euros! ROALD Dahl’s daughter, Lucy, 50, pictured, says she still weeps at the distress she caused her father when she burned down her boarding school kitchen and was expelled. On the occasion of Dahl’s centenary she says: ‘If I could take back anything in my life, it would be that. Because of the humiliation I put him through. It was in all the papers. No other school would have me. I was just a teenage girl, but he took it personally.’ FORMER Labour leader Neil Kinnock, 74, predicts catastrophe if Britain leaves the EU. He would, wouldn’t he? We reported in 2009 that former EU commissioner Kinnock and his MEP wife Glenys had made some £10million out of the EU. Now retired, the superannuated Kinnocks still rake in around £180,000 a year between them from five pensions – much of it from their jobs in Brussels. TORY MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, 47, who is usually courtly toward political rivals, was surprised by ex-PM Sir John Major expressing himself so angrily on TV while criticising Brexit leaders. He expected Major, as a Garter Knight, to behave with more decorum. Does the Queen agree? It’ll be interesting to see where she seats Major when he dons his robe and ostrich feathers for next Monday’s Garter lunch at Windsor. Sir John may well find himself seated ‘below the salt’. LABOUR peer Lord Myners, who is advising MPs on an inquiry into the collapse of BHS, says its former owner Sir Philip Green, who stands to receive up to £35million from the winding down of BHS, ‘could give up that security and make sure the money is used for the benefit of the employees and pensioners’. Laudable sentiments. Pity Lord Myners didn’t apply the same rigour to the catastrophic collapse of RBS when he allowed bank boss Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin to receive a £693,000 pension. Myners later explained that he hadn’t realised Goodwin could have been dismissed without the pension. Email: peter.mckay@dailymail.co.uk