Ephraim Hardcastle
FIFTEEN years after marrying Charles, Camilla is considered an appropriate royal to present the Queen Mother Champion Trophy at Cheltenham. So when will she be granted her own race at Royal Ascot? William has his own chase and there are canters named after Windsor Castle, St James’s Palace and Sandringham. She shouldn’t hold her breath. HM still hasn’t included her in the formal Church of England state prayers.
ONLY 150 guests have been invited to Princess Beatrice’s wedding, which will render the Buckingham Palace garden reception a curious affair. It occurs just 36 hours after the Queen bids farewell to the last of her tea and ice cream guests at her final annual garden party. She will be leaving the marquees and Portaloos in place for her granddaughter’s shindig. They might look forlorn in a tented village set-up to cater for 8,000 guests at a time. All very muted compared to sister Eugenie’s party for 800 in the state rooms at Windsor.
DAME Judi Dench, pictured, who admits not seeing her universally-panned film Cats – she plays feline Old Deuteronomy – displays remarkable sang-froid when informed by BBC Radio 4’s John Wilson that she’s been nominated for the worst supporting actress in the Golden Raspberry Awards. ‘Oh, am I?’ she trills. ‘Well that’s very good.’
HARRY’S phone hoaxers persuaded him to help a fictional island called ChungaChanga. In 1910 his ancestor Edward VII was gulled into allowing the fictitious Abyssinian emperor to tour the pride of the fleet, HMS Dreadnought. It transpired he was society hoaxer Horace de Vere Cole, with some blacked-up chums (including the future novelist Virginia Woolf). He showed his appreciation, chanting Bunga, Bunga.
RESPONDING to Harvey Weinstein’s 23year jail term, John Cleese tweets: ‘Seeing Weinstein’s sentence today reminds me of the judge who sentences an old man to 20 years in jail. The old man says, “I shall die before I get out.” The judge says, very kindly, “Well, just do as many as you can.”’
POETRY-loving Irish Ambassador Aidan O’Neill has ‘with great regret’ cancelled next week’s St Patrick’s Day drinks party at his Embassy in Belgravia. Final confirmation of the seriousness of Covid-19.
EVAN Davis now concludes his gloomy coronavirus-laden Radio 4 PM news programme with some soothing poetry or music. On Tuesday he played all of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ haunting Farewell to Stromness, a solo piano protest piece about proposals to mine for uranium on Orkney that was performed at the wedding of Charles and Camilla. The bass line is meant to depict residents of Stromness walking away from their Orkney homes because of uranium contamination. As the piece ended Davis un-profoundly wittered, ‘There’s a bit of Pachelbel’s Canon about that.’ Surely a free transfer to Radio 3 looms.