Ephraim Hardcastle
THE Queen’s attendance at US ambassador Woody Johnson’s Winfield House home for dinner next month indicates that Donald Trump will make a state visit to the UK in June. Tricky. It coincides with Royal Ascot and the ceremonial carriage procession. The US president’s Secret Service team will veto this because of his bathmophobia, fear of slopes and stairs. He won’t be able to negotiate the small steps to get in and out of the carriage. This ailment caused him to hold on to Theresa May’s hand when she went to Washington. Gripping on to the Queen isn’t permitted.
HM’s bean counters are challenging a £16,800 tax bill on her sporting land at Balmoral claiming it is ‘punitive’. The 50,000-acre Balmoral estate can certainly absorb it. A rise in the £11.50-a-head public admission price, a hike in the fees to fish or play golf or an increase in the holiday letting fees (currently up to £855 a week self-catering) should do it. Or possibly a collection tin in the estate shop to help a poor elderly lady pay her bills, something last seen in the Buck House staff bar back in 1992 when the monarch agreed to pay income tax.
PRINCE Edward, wife Sophie, pictured, and family enjoyed a half-term St Moritz skiing holiday as guests of billionaire art collector Urs Schwarzenbach, who had the royals flown to Switzerland in a £49million Gulfstream G650 private jet. Was it the same plane, perchance, that Urs used to smuggle works of art in a tax evasion scam, which led to a £9million fine last year?
BBC journalists have been told that ‘unconscious bias training’, is to be mandatory. Says my source: ‘They’re very sensitive about charges of anti-Brexit bias and believe some staff have appeared less than impartial even when imagining themselves to be balanced.’ Surely the BBC’s highest-paid presenter Gary Lineker (earning up to £1.76million a year) will be obliged to attend a session? The preachy sports presenter is controversially given free rein to regularly rant against Britain leaving the EU.
COMEDIAN Harry Enfield pays a tongue-in-cheek tribute to his dad Edward, who has died aged 90, in an Oldie blog, recalling how he’d scrimped to pay for his children’s education: ‘I used my expensive education to charm and cajole the successors of Lord Reith into giving me my own television programme, and now earn a tidy living from old age pensioners’ licence fees by making people as idiotic as myself laugh, generally through the comic devices of swearing, shouting and pretending to break wind.’
DOES Sacha Baron Cohen regret turning down the role of Freddie Mercury in Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, which earned Rami Malek a best actor Oscar? Baron Cohen, 47, famously sneered: ‘Listen, not one person is going to see a movie where the lead character dies from Aids and then you see how the band carries on...’