Ephraim Hardcastle
HAVING softened her views about Camilla, the Queen is likely to make the Duchess of Cornwall a royal lady of the Garter, I hear. Currently there are two – Princesses Anne and Alexandra. I am told a further elevation for Camilla, 70, indicates that she has become ‘the most senior royal woman after the Queen on state occasions’. She’s also become the oldest royal woman to be gartered, comfortably beating Princess Alexandra, who was 66. Prince Charles got his when he was nine. SOCIALITE Jemima Goldsmith, 44, pictured, who has two sons by her Pakistani ex-husband, Imran Khan, recalls an offensive conversation with an unnamed friend who told her: ‘Your boys are so good-looking... they don’t look Pakistani at all.’ A crass remark, but is it helpful to her sons, Sulaiman Isa Khan, 21, and Kasim Khan, 19, to broadcast this on the Twittersphere? THE Society of London Theatre, which organises the Olivier Awards, is trying to make amends after director Sir Peter Hall, who died aged 86 last year, was embarrassingly omitted from the annual ‘tributes to the departed’ at their 2018 ceremony. Henceforth the award for best director will be named after Sir Peter. How could they have forgotten about him? ‘While their “memorial montage” for the Oliviers was being compiled some of the luvvies involved were applying for their tickets for his memorial service in September,’ says my source. SIMON Gimson, 55, wrote a trenchant piece for The Times saying: ‘Commonwealth leadership needs sorting out, especially the selection process for the secretary-general.’ Kiwi Gimson should know. He was political director of the Commonwealth Secretariat under secretary-general ‘Baroness Shameless’ – aka high-spending Patricia Scotland, Baroness Scotland of Asthal PC QC, 62. Gimson is also a former assistant private secretary to the Queen, head of the Commonwealth. Does HM agree with him? HARD-Left commentator Owen Jones, 33, looking and sounding like a chippy 13year-old, attacks broadcaster Andrew Neil in The Guardian, saying his ‘Right-wing’ views disqualify him from working at the BBC – unlike his own Left-wing ones, presumably. Jones does admit: ‘It’s a grave error to turn up unprepared with (Neil) in the chair, as I discovered in one of my earliest TV appearances.’ After making specious claims about the earnings of Cabinet ministers, Jones was told on air by Neil: ‘You’re assuming that because someone’s worth a million pounds, they get a million pounds a year? No one in the Cabinet’s making a million pounds a year.’ THE New York Times ridicules Donald Trump’s claim that FBI raids on the home, office and hotel room of his lawyer – looking for evidence of the 45th president’s wrongdoing – is ‘an attack on our country’. They point out this is how the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 were described. They add that Trump’s own response on that day ‘was to point out that the fall of the Twin Towers meant your building was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan’, adding, ‘Of course, that also wasn’t true.’