Ephraim Hardcastle
HAVING secured an interview with Philip Roth’s ex-wife, Claire Bloom, 87, why did Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis allow gabby novelist Howard Jacobson to hog the proceedings? Bloom’s recollections of living with the often-unkind Roth were left unsaid as Jacobson, 75, waving his arms like a windmill, gushed forth about the late writer’s genius. Bloom managed to say, ‘I loved him, I admired him immensely,’ before Jacobson weighed in unnecessarily: ‘And a tumultuous writer!’ Howard’s the end, isn’t he?
PRINCE Harry’s ex-girlfriend, Cressida Bonas, who attended his wedding to Meghan Markle, glosses over her feelings about Harry’s nuptials in The Spectator acknowledging it’s been a difficult few days for her family. ‘This week it’s the death of my mother’s beloved Pekingese, Pocket: 13, blind, deaf and, most recently, incontinent... she says no one understood him like her.’ Actress Cressida, 29, who ‘amicably’ split with Harry in 2014, adds: ‘The waiter, Otto, thinks we are talking about a relative. Pouring the coffee, he looks uncomfortable as my mother discusses Pocket’s place of burial.’ Might mother Lady Mary-Gaye Curzon also wonder what life might have been like as a royal mother-in-law?
EMILY Mortimer, pictured, enthuses about Isabel Coixet, director of her latest film, The Bookshop: ‘She took me to a Russian restaurant in London. There was a button by our table that said “Press for champagne”. I knew from that moment that I really had to do this film.’ Emily’s thirsty dad – ‘champagne socialist’ Sir John Mortimer – would have approved.
LAURENCE Olivier’s biographer, Roger Lewis, recalls Anthony Hopkins approaching the National Theatre boss and saying: ‘Look, my father’s died. I’ve got to go down to Wales for the funeral. Is it all right?’ Olivier said, ‘Oh, of course you can, of course dear boy!’ Adds Lewis: ‘When Hopkins was going past Olivier’s door 20 minutes later, he heard Olivier’s voice coming through the door, talking to himself, saying, “Oh, of course you can, dear boy!”’ Always the perfectionist, Olivier hadn’t stopped rehearsing.
LADY Thatcher’s former press secretary, Sir Bernard Ingham, 85, takes a dim view of ex-Tory minister David Willetts’ think tank proposal to give 25-year-olds a £10,000 handout, writing: ‘This nonsense is the product of the curious mind of Lord Willetts, a young politician in my time, who was rising so fast he was labelled “Two Brains Willetts”. Now we know he is sadly short upstairs.’ Still he was clever enough to bag a life peerage.
THE complaint by BBC Daily Politics presenter Andrew Neil about the length of Prime Minister’s Questions under Speaker John Bercow provokes a peevish, un-parliamentary response from the latter: ‘I couldn’t give a flying flamingo about the opinions of A Neil Esquire.’