Ephraim Hardcastle
RoMANCE rarely evades the mind of Boris’s former paramour, Petronella Wyatt, even during a pandemic. She muses that unnamed businessmen and politicians, in lockdown with wives they dislike, are clamouring for their mistresses. ‘over the weekend, two men tried to pick me up whilst I was walking [my dog] Mini,’ she adds. ‘one of them was rather attractive, and lives near me, so we have a date for coffee in two months. Talk about long courtships.’
THE Queen Mother, an avid viewer of the US soap Dallas featuring the late Larry Hagman as ruthless oil baron JR Ewing, was keen to solve the mystery of Who Shot JR. His co-star Linda Gray remembers Hagman meeting the QM and her saying: ‘“You can tell me, Larry.” He refused and replied, “Not even for you, Ma’am”.’
ITV News’s national editor, Allegra Stratton, is Rishi Sunak’s new six-figuresalaried director of strategic communications at the Treasury. Coincidentally, her hubby – journalist James Forsyth – was a contemporary of Sunak at Winchester College.
NEWSNIGHT’S Emily Maitlis, pictured, waxes nostalgic at lockdown easing, tweeting: ‘ The “choose your ten” [ lockdown friends and family] scenario has transported me straight back to the dorm-sharing complexities of the 1981 Llangollen Youth Hostel Association school trip. I’m getting actual palpitations.’ Do tell, Em!
SIR Cliff Richard tells a BBC 4 documentary that he and The Shadows were so successful in the early Sixties that they forced The Beatles into pop exile in Hamburg. ‘We drove them out!’ trills Cliff, immodestly.
FORMER Oxford organ scholar Anna Lapwood shares her unorthodox rehearsal technique with Radio Times saying: ‘During lockdown at home, I’ve been trying to improve my playing posture. So I stacked two loo rolls on my head to see how long I could play without them falling off.’ So that’s where all the toilet tissue went!
DID Piers Morgan’s delightful wife Celia cringe when he verbally mauled care minister Helen Whately on Good Morning Britain? Mrs Morgan and Helen were in the same year at Westminster School.
RECOVERED coronavirus patient Tom Hanks volunteers his blood for Covid-19 research. Having played so many screen characters, let’s hope the plasma is Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell’s rather than an armful from Forrest Gump! oXFoRD philosopher John Lucas, who has died aged 90, had to relinquish his membership of the BBC’s commission on violent programmes when his sparse TV viewing was exposed. He admitted watching twice: the 1969 Moon landing and the 1953 Coronation.