Ephraim Hardcastle

WHEN Prince Charles meets King Felipe of Spain next week he’s unlikely to bring up the gap between their salaries. Felipe gets paid just under £208,000, while Queen Letizia gets £114,000. It’s all part of a commitment to frugality by Felipe, who took a 20 per cent pay cut to share his people’s austerity. Charles, who had the Crown Estate bean counters round to Clarence House on Wednesday to discuss last year’s £42.8million income, muddles along on his Duchy of Cornwall income – £22.5million. LABOUR’S deputy leader Tom Watson accepted an invitation to Wimbledon’s Royal Box on Wednesday, waddling into a seat beside the Duke of Kent. Supreme leader Corbyn declined his invite. Is the All England Club keeping Labour on side, just in case the comrades get into No 10? EAMONN Holmes, 57, lost his ‘Who Ate All the Pies’ nickname after threatening the BBC with legal action in 2010 when impressionist Jon Culshaw portrayed him eating a sofa as well as jockey Frankie Dettori, declaring: ‘I was fierce hungry, so I was.’ Now Eamonn, in C5 documentary How the Other Half Lives, makes a mess of the place settings for a posh dinner. ‘Does that mean I have failed butler school?’ he asks. Domestic servant recruiter Lucy Challenger replies: ‘It does unfortunately.’ ITV’s hyperactive political editor Robert Peston, 57, pictured, raised eyebrows gurning in an interactive photo booth and punching a pink balloon at the Saatchi Gallery English Roses exhibition this week. Peston’s image was superimposed on to a giant interactive screen, prompting one Saatchi staffer to sniff: ‘The exhibit was designed to showcase alluring young female roses, not prickly middle-aged male thorns’ POMPOUS former funnyman John Cleese, 77, annoyed Nairn-born Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, 44, by calling him a ‘half-educated tenement Scot’. That was before Fraser discovered the BBC wanted to use his plush Twickenham house for filming a new sitcom – ‘It turns out that f***** Cleese is going to be there,’ he said. Now Cleese fires back at Nelson: ‘The art department confirmed... they had seen the house. But as they didn’t like it, they didn’t use it.’ Seconds Out! Round Two! PASSING comment on the Grenfell Tower fire, Left-wing playwright James Graham, 35, complains about private contractors maintaining council housing. He says: ‘Funded by taxpayers, completely unaccountable.’ Could the same unaccountable, publicly funded charge not be levelled at the likes of the National Theatre, London’s Almeida Theatre and the Theatre Royal in Plymouth, which have all promoted Graham’s work and receive millions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash at ‘arm’s length’ from political supervision? THE Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, suing over 2012 topless photographs of Kate, were initially relieved that a decision on their £1.3million claim was deferred until September 5. But this falls in the same week as the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s funeral, making William’s court statement linking pictures of his topless wife with his mother’s fatal fleeing from the paparazzi look, at least, unwise.