Ephraim Hardcastle
WHERE will expectant parents Prince Harry and Meghan roost in London now? Their two-bedroom Nottingham Cottage at Kensington Palace is inadequate. They hoped for the 21-room Apartment 1 at KP – next door to William and Kate – but there’s a snag. My source says: ‘Renovation work there is completed but the current occupants, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, aren’t keen on moving out.’ Things aren’t easy either for the Duke of Kent, who doesn’t seem to matter in the new royal strategy. PRINCE Charles and Camilla took 13 Clarence House staff to the Commonwealth Games in Queensland in April, costing Australia £155,000 in transport costs alone, according to a parliamentary answer in Canberra. The party included a doctor, dresser, butler, valet and travelling yeoman, prompting the national director of the Australian Republican Movement Michael Cooney to remark: ‘I thought the Travelling Yeomen were a Tom Petty tribute band.’ BARONESS Kennedy, 68, a QC at Doughty Street Chambers where (40year-old) Amal Clooney is a human rights barrister, says she had a crush on the latter’s husband, actor George Clooney. ‘I now know George too well,’ says Dame Helena, adding: ‘He is my friend’s husband, a lovely man. As for Amal, she’s a terrific barrister, a lovely mother, a fabulous dresser.’ Such a schmoozer! FIRST Man, the new movie about Neil Armstrong’s historic 1969 walk on the moon, has a haunting moment when he deliberately leaves behind a bracelet belonging to his dead daughter Karen. Did this happen? The late Armstrong, played by Ryan Gosling, pictured, never said so publicly but his biographer James Hansen mentions it. First Man screenwriter Josh Singer says: ‘We won’t know for sure until we go back to the moon.’ TORY MP Jacob Rees-Mogg earned £1,200 for three articles in a broadsheet newspaper that pays fellow Brexiteer Boris Johnson £275,000 a year for his weekly column. ‘This equates for Boris to a pay rate of £2,291 an hour, or around £4.80 a word,’ says the Europhile paper The New European. Surely Jacob’s a bigger draw now. MEGHAN Markle tickles Australians by wearing a pair of locally designed, £108 denim jeans made by ‘women survivors of sex trafficking in Cambodia’. Designer Erica Bartle says: ‘The Meghan effect is phenomenal. It’s an enormous boost to our morale and means a lot to our girls in Cambodia that the duchess might wear the jeans that they made.’ THE Who’s pro-Brexit frontman Roger Daltrey is reminded by Radio 4’s John Wilson that he’s ‘out of step politically’ with some musicians on the Brexit issue, including Remoaning Boomtown Rat Bob Geldof. Daltrey, 74, queries: ‘You’re calling him a musician?’