Ephraim Hardcastle
THERE was a hasty rewrite of the Queen’s briefing notes for her encounter with Donald Trump on Friday following his forthright comments on Brexit. Conscious of his inability to keep secrets, the notes advised Her Majesty to change the subject if Brexit came up. Subsequently, the US President claimed that she had thought Brexit ‘a very complex problem’. Nothing controversial there, although it does show a change of view from her pre-referendum support for Brexit, when she supposedly told then deputy PM Nick Clegg: ‘I don’t see why we can’t just get out.’
CONVENTIONAL wisdom suggested that the Queen’s part in the tea-time conversation with Trump might have been limited because the garrulous President doesn’t often come up for air. Wrong! He was overawed into silence at times, possibly perplexed by the confusing etiquette of the English tea table. Trump’s protocol office had produced a briefing about taking tea but he’s not one for heavy reading.
APROPOS Trump: Suggestions that the Royal Family snubbed the President and left the Queen to cope with him alone are way off the mark. When it comes to audiences with heads of state the Queen always does them alone. Apart from Trump, HM has given solo private audiences this year to the King and Queen of the Belgians, to the presidents of Estonia and South Africa and, almost as controversial as Trump, to President Erdogan of Turkey.
NOTING that the BBC’s top celebrity earner is Gary Lineker (up to £1.76million a year), Jeremy Clarkson, 58, tweets: ‘This BBC salary stuff is disgusting. But I’m appalled that [ political editor] Laura Kuenssberg, isn’t above Lineker. She’s properly brilliant.’ Did no-nonsense Kuenssberg, 42, pictured, who earns up to £230,000 a year, realise she had such a smitten fan in old charmer Jeremy?
PRESENTER and Brexit supporter Anne Robinson, 73, tires of self-absorbed Remainer types, writing in The Oldie: ‘Just after the referendum, almost any gathering of my friends had them weeping and wailing as if their dog had just died or their cleaning lady had walked out. Remainers need to get over it.’
EX-MONTY Python member Terry Gilliam, 77, ridicules BBC comedy chief Shane Allen for his recent claim that the 1970s show would not be commissioned in 2018 because it features ‘six Oxbridge white blokes’, saying: ‘I no longer want to be a white male, blamed for everything wrong in the world. Now I’m a black lesbian, my name is Loretta and I’m a BLT – a black lesbian in transition.’ Calm down, dear.
CRAIG Cash, the late Caroline Aherne’s Royle Family co-star, tells Radio Times that she used to kiss scripts before sending them to the BBC, adding: ‘Mind you, she kissed a lot of things. She was so in love with Hugh Grant that she kissed the TV screen when he was on it. When her TV broke, the repair man wondered why there was lipstick all over it!