Ephraim Hardcastle Ephraim Hardcastle
REDEMPTION comes slowly to former jailbird Jonathan Aitken. Now a priest, the former Tory Cabinet minister has landed his first wedding. Married to the late Richard Harris’s ex-wife Elizabeth, he will marry his step-granddaughter Ella, 28, daughter of Richard’s son Damian, to Soho House executive Philip Harley at Sarsden House, Chipping Norton, next month. Says Jonathan, who mostly brings God to his previous chums in HM’s prisons: ‘Makes a change from jail.’
APROPOS Elizabeth: when her son Jared’s character hanged himself in Mad Men, it was so vivid she called him in Los Angeles to ensure he was OK. Now his character in Chernobyl has also committed suicide. Was she upset? ‘No,’ she says. ‘With the Harris family, I have had more hangings, shootings, beheadings and scalpings to last a lifetime.’
THE Queen’s absence in Scotland when her newest great-grandchild Archie is christened next month hasn’t caused a ripple of fuss. Last July she didn’t show up for the baptism of Prince Louis at St James’s Palace even though she was just up the road at Buckingham Palace with nothing in the diary. The novelty of greatgrandchildren is wearing thin with the monarch – Archie is her eighth.
MR Rachel Johnson, aka Ivo Dawnay, confides his fears to The Lady that the disastrous showing of his wife, pictured, for Change UK in the European election hasn’t deterred her, saying: ‘My fear is that – like Eve, having tasted the sweet seductive apple of political knowledge – she will be unable to resist.’ It seems to run in the family!
SAJID Javid’s delayed anger about not being invited to Donald Trump’s state banquet baffles royal courtiers, who point out that home secretaries aren’t automatically on the guest list. Javid didn’t whinge when he didn’t get an invitation to last October’s feast for the King of the Netherlands, the only other state banquet held since he got the job.
MEGHAN Markle didn’t mark Father’s Day with a reconciliatory message to her dad Thomas. But then Kate Middleton hasn’t celebrated her dad either. The Kensington Palace Instagram features William playing with Louis and with Prince Charles. But no mention of Michael Middleton, dad of a future queen.
COMPANIONSHIP comes in different ways, and for Hawaii-based writer Paul Theroux it was a goose called Willy. He was Paul’s only consolation when his brothers sent him insulting messages about Mother Land, his no-holds-barred 2017 autobiographical novel. Discussing Willy’s unexpected death in the London Review of Books, he says: ‘In my solitude and loss, I could not believe my grief.’ Sounds like a suitable case for study by his documentary-making son Louis…