Ephraim Hardcastle
SKY’S incoming political editor Beth Rigby felt like banging her clipboard against her forehead in frustration yesterday at the omerta-like lack of leaks from Theresa May’s sevenhour Cabinet pow wow. Well-informed Beth, who boasts of sharing a WhatsApp group with several key ministers and invariably passes on minute-by-minute snippets to her viewers, wailed: ‘They haven’t had their phones back – I can tell from WhatsApp.’
SARAH, Duchess of York’s dismissal of gossip that she and Prince Andrew were back together as a couple after attending the Bahrain Grand Prix was succinct and to the point. She told friends: ‘It is all b******s’.
INCREASINGLY coquettish Treasury Secretary Liz Truss, 43, pictured, narrowly survived censure from her constituency officers, known as the Norfolk Taliban, when she had an extra-marital affair with then-Tory minister Mark Field in 2004. Now with conspicuous ambitions to succeed Theresa May, Miss Truss’s Thatcherite views, support for tax cuts, feverish devotion to social media – not to mention her blonde locks – have spawned a new nickname: The Norfolk Trump.
PRUE Leith told yesterday’s Oldie lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand that she loves the attention she gets as Mary Berry’s replacement on The Great British Bake Off, adding: ‘I was asked for my autograph by someone who looked at my signature and declared, “But you’re not Mary Berry.”’
EX-TORY MP Heidi Allen should consider what’s in a name after her surprise appointment as ‘interim leader’ of the Independent Group of pro-Remain MPs. Westminster wags have already condensed Change UK to ‘Chuka’ after its smoothie-chops real leader, ex-Labour MP Chuka Umunna, who is expected to ‘Chuk’ Miss Allen out before long.
PROFESSIONAL battleaxe and former Tory minister Ann Widdecombe bluntly concludes on BBC 2’s Newsnight: ‘We’ve got the worst Prime Minister since Anthony Eden; we’ve got the worst Leader of the Opposition in the entire history of the Labour Party; and we’ve got the worst Parliament since Oliver Cromwell.’ Don’t hold back now, Ann!
DELIGHTFULLY daft Sarah Miles, who had an affair with Laurence Olivier, has discovered 13 of his ‘forgotten’ love letters in her attic and isn’t sure if the thespian would want them published, explaining: ‘He said I could write about the affair five years after his death.’ Sarah, a word in your shell-like: Dear Larry has been dead for thirty years. Get a move on, love.
COMPLAINING of her death by poison as Lady Olenna in the lucrative Game of Thrones, Dame Diana Rigg says, ‘It wasn’t my decision… I’d love to have stayed on,’ adding: ‘Thank God I didn’t die on a toilet like Charles Dance’s character.’
Email: john.mcentee@dailymail.co.uk