Ephraim Hardcastle
BBC newscaster Huw Edwards secured a scoop yesterday when Boris Johnson told him he was in the running to replace Theresa May. Huw wasn’t interviewing Boris for the Beeb but for the British Insurance Brokers’ Association. Was Boris, like Huw, paid for announcing his re-entry into front-line politics? LONG considered a distress signal the Union Jack on Theresa May’s Range Rover, when she arrived to meet President Macron in Paris, was flying upside down. Was this a secret cry for help from Theresa? FRIENDS of Sarah Sands, editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, would never accuse her of grandstanding but even the most eagle-eared listener yesterday failed to detect any crowing over her show’s impressive, increased audience – now 7.32million daily. Might she have warbled Que Sera Sera? PRINCESS Michael’s daughter Lady Gabriella Windsor, pictured, delighted that the Queen is attending her St George’s Chapel wedding tomorrow, still hopes Prince William might make an appearance. As FA President, he’ll be at Wembley presenting the FA Cup, having missed out last year due to brother Harry’s nuptials. Logistically he could dash from Windsor to Wembley via helicopter but then why risk the obligatory tantrum from the global warming phobes at Extinction Rebellion? AS a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Australian politician Bob Hawke, who has died, was notorious for philandering with female students in a white wagon described colloquially as a shag van. When documentary maker Michael Cockerell asked him to confirm the story Hawke mischievously replied: ‘Not true. It was actually a fornicatorium’. SEVENTEEN years after Angus Deayton exited Have I Got News For You after a sex and drugs scandal Ian Hislop claims that if he hadn’t been fired the show would have faced the axe, adding: ‘I was furious with him for screwing it up for himself, for us... I thought we’d [all] be sacked. You can imagine he hasn’t spoken to me since. I regret that termination.’ NORTHERN lass and BBC Breakfast presenter Steph McGovern, 36, tweets: ‘So Conrad Black, the former media baron, has been pardoned by Trump... I’m still waiting for an apology from his wife [Barbara Amiel] after she called me a “slag” when I was covering his trial in Chicago.’ Surely not! JULIET Stevenson can’t shake off the late Alan Rickman, who played her dead lover in Truly, Madly, Deeply. ‘I miss him desperately’, she says. ‘Now he sits on my shoulder, telling me off.’ Time for Ghostbusters surely?