Ephraim Hardcastle

SURELY Jeremy Corbyn’s demand for the class backgrounds of BBC staff to be made public reeks of kettle and pot? The Labour leader was part privately-educated in Shropshire, his biographer describing his upbringing as ‘thoroughly upper-middle class’. His sourseeming strategy and communications director, Seumas Milne, went to posh feepaying Winchester College, as did Corbyn’s head of strategic communications, James Schneider. Has Corbyn run out of feet to shoot himself in? APROPOS Corbyn and the BBC: Hatred for the corporation runs deep in the veins of Seumas Milne, whose late father Alasdair was director-general from 1982 to 1987. He was forced out by the BBC’s board of governors, whose chairman was Margaret Thatcher’s so-called ‘hatchet man’ Marmaduke Hussey. His son bitterly wrote in 2015: ‘The BBC is full of Conservatives and former New Labour apparatchiks with almost identical views about politics, business and the world. Executives have stuffed their pockets with public money.’ HAVING famously portrayed psychotic ‘bunny boiler’ Alex Forrest 30 years ago in Fatal Attraction, Glenn Close, 71, now wants the character to be revived on screen and portrayed in a more sympathetic light. The actress, pictured in the film, tells BBC Breakfast: ‘I think it would be fascinating to tell the story from Alex Forrest’s point of view, because she was not one of the great villains of all time... I was playing a very specific human being who was in crisis.’ Let’s hope no rabbits are harmed in Fatal Attraction 2! BREXIT Secretary Dominic Raab took a subtle dig at one of the BBC’s most vehement Europhiles yesterday. He dismissed ‘wilder’ claims that Brexit would hit sandwiches, insisting that our favourite BLT was safe. BBC business editor Simon Jack – seen as a whiny Remainer – pushed the ‘Brexit threat to sandwiches’ line in July. BROADCASTER Richard Madeley’s abrupt termination of his interview with Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson on Good Morning Britain in May was ‘probably the most popular thing I’ve ever done on TV’, he tells the Spectator. But he complains that the T-word is following him everywhere, with one smarmy waiter quipping: ‘You wish to terminate your meal, Mr Madeley?’ AS youngsters received their GCSE results yesterday, tycoons Lord Sugar and Sir Richard Branson took to social media to trumpet the fact they enjoyed success despite academic failure. ‘GCSE results... if you didn’t get the grades don’t panic,’ tweeted Sugar, 71. ‘Richard Branson didn’t get any. I never went to Uni.’ Branson, 68, announced: ‘I left school at 16 and pursued my passions and interests – and it’s served me well over the years. The key to success isn’t exam results.’ Having an enormous ego helps, evidently. JUG-EARED actor Martin Clunes, 56, says that the late Sherlock Holmes star Jeremy Brett, his mother’s cousin, offered to pay for his ears to be pinned back: ‘But surgery seemed a step too far. I’d probably have starved without them.’