Ephraim Hardcastle
HARRY and Meghan’s choice of American Episcopalian bishop Michael Curry as preacher is an embarrassment to the chief celebrant, and head of the Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. Curry’s church, which has ordained gay bishops, is banned for three years from Anglican Communion activities, with Archbishop Welby expressing ‘deep concern’ about its removal of references to marriage being between ‘one man and one woman’. Parachuting Curry in shows what side Meghan and Harry are on in the battle for the future direction of Anglicanism.
PROFESSOR John Sutherland, 79, marks the 200th anniversary of the creation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with a scholarly work, Frankenstein’s Brain. He concludes that the melancholy monster was probably equipped with the machinery of manhood, explaining: ‘When he comes on the sleeping body of Justine [the blonde with whom he falls in love] he gets very aroused.’
DURING pro-EU campaigner David Miliband’s appearance on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, interviewer John Humphrys bluntly pointed out: ‘There will be people who say, “Hang on, he used to be foreign secretary, he ran for the leadership of his party. When he didn’t get it he left the country and lives abroad, running a charity from New York. What’s it got to do with him?”’ Quite!
MARLON Brando beat Elvis Presley hands down when it came to performance between the sheets, says West Side Story star Rita Moreno, 86, pictured in her prime. She had a tempestuous eightyear affair with Brando, saying: ‘He was really one of the most sexual men on Earth. He slayed me good.’ When he refused to marry her, she took up with Presley, who by comparison with the libidinous Brando ‘was like a two-yearold’. Lucky for macho Marlon, he died in 2004, aged 80, before #MeToo got going.
THE Guardian has parted company with its No 2 theatre critic, a (white) Leftist called Lyn Gardner, described to me as ‘prone to attacking stage productions for not being female enough or minority-laden enough’. My source adds: ‘The paper’s main theatre critic, Michael Billington, trundles along happily in his 79th year, somehow managing to contain his desolation at Ms Gardner’s defenestration.’
VOWING to quit Britain after the Government refused to curb Press freedom, John Cleese, 78 – previously a tax exile in Monaco – returned to the UK to live in his ‘favourite city’ of Bath, saying: ‘My wife [Jennifer, 45, his fourth] has taken to keeping goats. So we need a garden… you can’t keep goats in a small flat.’ Neither are they easily transported abroad, of course.
THE Princess Royal, 67, is looking for a new private secretary who has ‘a well-developed understanding of the UK’s political, economic and geographical infrastructure, as well as the constitution and British media’. And enjoys travelling. ‘Busy bee Anne thinks nothing of doing a day of engagements in Scotland followed by an official dinner in London,’ I am told.