Ephraim Hardcastle

BBC bigwigs entertained ambitions of asking the Queen to officially open the £87million EastEnders set. Due for completion early this year, the project at Elstree is running five years late and £27million over budget. Her Majesty will be 97 when construction is completed and unlikely to enthuse about a visit to the refurbished Queen Vic. She did meet the then landlady Barbara Windsor on set in 2001. If all else fails, EastEnders stalwart Danny Dyer, a descendant of William the Conqueror and Edward III, could do the honours. THERESA May has yet to pack her pyjamas to vacate Downing Street and already Baroness Meyer (wife of Britain’s former US ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer) disputes the description of her as a ‘personal friend’, stating on BBC2’s Victoria Derbyshire show: ‘I know her; I know her well. But personal friend?’ Oh dear! JEREMY Corbyn, his rheumy eye focused on Downing Street, releases details of his robust keep-fit regime. Born in 1949 and about to turn 70, he will be almost 73 when the next scheduled general election is called in May 2022. Britain’s oldest PM to assume office for the first time was Lord Palmerston in 1885 at 70 years and 109 days. Shell suit or no shell suit, is OAP Jeremy too old for high office? ENGLISH actress Kate Beckinsale, 45, pictured, deletes her Instagram posts after a picture of her with a baby cheetah triggers the comment ‘You like them young’. Divorced Kate is dating US comic Pete Davidson, 20 years her junior, some calling her a cougar. She should have a word with Joan Collins, 85. She brushed off snide remarks about fifth husband Percy Gibson being 31 years younger with: ‘If he dies, he dies.’ ATTENDING a Dublin performance of Samuel Beckett’s obscure All That Fall, Irish president Michael D Higgins and his wife Sabrina had to comply with the writer’s stage direction that the audience must wear blindfolds. Why? Written as a BBC radio play in 1956, Beckett decreed it was not for visual consumption. NOT since Anthony Trollope’s mother Frances skewered the US in her 1832 book Domestic Manners Of The Americans has a writer flambéed a nation like New York Post columnist Cindy Adams, who quotes a friend’s bleak description of France, with soldiers in Paris, ‘fingers on the trigger, stations littered with debris, the Louvre deserted, at the Eiffel Tower, beggars and pickpockets, migrants and refugees fill streets’. Has well-read Emmanuel Macron forgotten Voltaire’s advice in Candide: ‘We must take care of our garden’? GRUMBLING about the hazards of being tall, 6ft 5in Tory peer Lord Young of Cookham recalls a Companions of Honour group photograph when he was placed next to ‘one of the smallest actresses I have ever come across’. Young is too gentlemanly to name her, but the photo shows him towering over 5ft tiddler Dame Judi Dench. He admits: ‘It looks very odd in the picture.’