Ephraim Hardcastle
MIGHT the Queen’s Birthday Honours list be a casualty of the virus? Due in June, it could be postponed or even cancelled. Letters asking recipients if they’ll accept gongs are normally dispatched about now. With a backlog of suspended investitures, adding another 1,100 baubles to the queue might be too much for the system.
SKY’S Adam Boulton was in ungenerous mood following Boris’s Wednesday TV appearance, tweeting pompously: ‘Poor performance by hacks at PM news conference. Forgetting the basics like what are the latest stats? Also, I would have asked about Prince Charles.’ Oh, to be a fly on the wall when Sky’s political editor Beth Rigby catches up with grumpy Boulton. Take No Prisoners Beth was there.
RIVER Café owner Ruth Rogers is not entirely downcast at the enforced coronavirus closure of her fashionable nosherie. She is now offering a takeaway service, giving consolation to diners unable to play Who’s Got The Best Table?
SOME recipients of the nationwide Covid19 text message might have experienced a frisson of shock. How many pay-as-yougo drug dealers and residents of Her Majesty’s jails with illegal mobiles wondered where Boris got their number?
BBC Radio 4 Today listeners should have been impressed with Ocado chief and ex-M&S boss Lord Rose spouting about retail challenges and even offering culinary advice on extracting three meals from a single chicken – a stark contrast to his lacklustre performance as head of the Remain campaign. Quips one listener: ‘If he’d been like this we’d still be in the EU.’
ASKED if he was in the British Library when he appeared in front of his bookshelves on BBC’s The One Show, Gyles Brandreth said: ‘These are just the books I’m hoping to read during my self-isolation. Because of the feedback, I’m going to do a daily tour of my shelves on Twitter and Instagram.’ So many self-isolating broadcasters use bookcases as backdrops that it’s led to a parlour game – Spot The Titles.
ANNEKA Rice, pictured, was luckier than the late Sir Terry Wogan when she traced her discarded Madame Tussauds head to the Wookey Hole amusement park in Somerset. Complained Terry: ‘I was melted down to make Ant and Dec.’
FORMER Chancellor Sajid Javid tells a poignant post-resignation tale of throwing some clothes in a case in his Downing Street flat and heading for the door, only to be halted by his wife, Laura, who told him to take Bailey, the family Cavapoo, adding: ‘Here’s the lead and a poo bag.’
FORMER Tory whip Tristan Garel-Jones, who has died, was mocked for his German army-style loden coat by MP Sir Carol Mather, who said: ‘The last time I saw a chap in a coat like that, I shot him!’