Ephraim Hardcastle
MARGARET Thatcher’s former private secretary, Charles Powell, says she would never have supported Brexit. Really? He and her ex-Press secretary, Sir Bernard Ingham, were once a popular double act while explaining the workings of the Iron Lady’s mind. Yet they are not as one over Brexit. Sir Bernard feels ‘joy unconfined’ over our EU break, saying: ‘It would help if Lord Powell abandoned his nonsense that Mrs Thatcher would never have led us out of Europe.’ Perhaps the answer is that Powell resides near Rome while Yorkshire-born Sir Bernard is Surrey-based.
MOTHER Teresa of Calcutta’s sainthood contradicts the claim of her biographer, Washington- based, British- born Christopher Hitchens, who, before dying in 2011 aged 62, called her ‘a lying, thieving Albanian dwarf’. The late Cardinal Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster, would have deplored the remark but Teresa tried his patience. An ex- aide recalls: ‘She managed to persuade him to give her 16 rows of pews from the Cathedral on condition that she wait until replacements arrived. The following day a nun from her order drove a truck to the Cathedral door and removed the pews.’
BARBRA Streisand tells an audience in Toronto that she likes Canada because ‘you can turn on the TV and you can see Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. I was also a pretty big admirer of his father’. Too discreet, surely. The pair (pictured) were lovers in the late 1960s. He was 50, she 27. (Much-loved Ms Streisand, 74, is not ageist; another lover, tennis champion Andre Agassi, was 28 years her junior.) Surely PM Justin, 44, happily married with children, is beyond temptation.
TORY MP and ex-Army officer Johnny Mercer, 35, pokes fun at scandal-stricken Labour MP Keith Vaz, 59. After it emerged last year that muscle-bound Mercer had once appeared half-naked in an advert for shower gel on US TV, Vaz sent him a bar of soap and a congratulatory note. Mercer taunts him on Twitter: ‘That soap and kind note you sent me takes on a different shade now.’
NORFOLK nurse and Bake Off contestant Kate Barmby, a Brownie leader, was surprised when presenters Mary Berry and Mel Giedroyc recited to her the Brownie Promise ‘to serve God and the Queen’. Ms Barmby didn’t have the heart to tell them God was relegated by the Brownies in 2013. Now their promise is more insular – ‘to be true to myself and develop my beliefs’.
LORD Prescott says his wife, Pauline, once sat next to Sir Philip Green in the front row of a fashion show. When she asked the now-shamed retail tycoon’s name, he replied: ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ Prezza adds: ‘As Pauline reminded me last week, “Well, we all do now!”’ Do you share my suspicion about the authenticity of some ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ stories?