Ephraim Hardcastle
ANDREW O’Hagan, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, says of meeting its patron: ‘I don’t think the Queen liked me, the snooping anti-monarchist with the new tie, so she simply passed me to her husband, who asked if a novelist wrote books.’ Reviewing Netflix’s royal series The Crown, for London Review of Books, Scots novelist O’Hagan, 48, remarks peevishly about the 95-year-old Duke of Edinburgh: ‘It’s his tragedy, and our comedy, or the reverse, that he got to live out his inferiority complex on the world’s stage.’ Surely this is a trifle harsh from an FRSL?
DO you have nice handwriting and can write about 700 names and titles a day ‘with 100 per cent accuracy … in consistently exceptional and beautiful handwriting’? If so, Royal Ascot officials might employ you from the end of January until mid- June to inscribe 2017 Royal Enclosure badges. Salary: £14,500.
MARIELLA Frostrup, 54, confounds Dr Johnson’s observation that when one is tired of London one is tired of life by moaning in Waitrose Weekend about overcrowded Tube trains and ubiquitous roadworks. She says: ‘My favourite pastime is trying to spot a workman at roadworks.’ Perhaps an update of Johnson’s adage might advise that when a former girlfriend of George Clooney spends her time counting construction workers she has little else to do.
THE Prime Minister Theresa May is not an admirer of cookery star Delia Smith, of whom she has said: ‘I will not allow a Delia Smith cook book in my house! It’s all too precise with Delia, and it makes cooking seem so inaccessible.’ Nothing to do with Delia being a lifelong Labour supporter, surely?
RE Mrs May and the row over her £995 leather trousers, Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministerial consort, Denis, asked who really wore the trousers at No 10, said: ‘I do … and I wash and iron them, too!’
AS editor of BrexitCentral, Jonathan Isaby campaigns for the EU referendum verdict to be delivered. Now he thinks the same should apply in reality TV, explaining: ‘I was delighted to see the ludicrous (rapper) Honey G booted off The X Factor. Yet she was invited back to perform on Saturday night’s show.’ The fading X Factor’s producers hoped in vain that it would Remain popular but it was trounced by Strictly Come Dancing.