Ephraim Hardcastle
CONFIRMING that his mother Lady Carina Frost has finally been given the all-clear from advanced melanoma, her son Wilf says that she is particularly upbeat at not having to endure her fortnightly London hospital treatments during lockdown. And, paying a touching tribute to his mother, New York-based TV presenter Wilf, who lost his father Sir David in 2013 and brother Miles in 2015, adds: ‘It was literally a twoyear cycle, Dad, then Miles and then her cancer. She is the most remarkable, strong, inspiration to George [his brother] and I.’
REFLECTING on the consequences of lockdown life, Jeremy Paxman, predicts ‘the arrival of great numbers of lockdown babies’, adding: ‘I see no sign that the call of the wild has lost out to Call The Midwife.’ Romancing books editor Jillian Taylor – almost 30 years his junior – is Paxo contemplating elderly fatherhood?
ABOUT to go bust with debts of £20,000 in 1960, the London Library was delighted to get manuscripts from TS Eliot, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh with the Queen gifting a book on Benvenuto Cellini, the Renaissance sculptor, from Queen Victoria’s Library. The Queen Mother sent a silver wine cooler. Did the royal toper think the library was a front for a bar?
BARBRA Streisand, pictured, gifts valuable Disney shares to George Floyd’s daughter Gianna, who responds: ‘I am now a Disney stockholder thanks to you.’ Alas, old Walt was known to use racist terms such as the dread Nword and ‘piccaninny’. And in his 1933 animated film Mickey’s Mellerdrammer he even blackfaced Mickey Mouse.
THE Palace of Westminster – dotted with buckets catching rainwater, riddled with asbestos, crumbling masonry and mice, and with miles of naked wiring snaking through the basement – is seeking a director of health and safety. Is the £105K annual salary sufficient?
CONSTITUTIONAL expert Vernon Bogdanor gallantly defends Home Secretary Priti Patel after 32 Labour MPs accused her of trying to manipulate the racism debate, adding: ‘There is just one party in this country that has been formally charged with racism, and that is Labour, which awaits the decision of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission on whether it has been guilty of anti-Semitism.’
RECOVERING from the virus, Jonathan Aitken heaps praise on his wife Elizabeth Harris, disabled by a brain haemorrhage. ‘Her, immunity system clearly has the strength of a battleship for she has sailed serenely on in good health while her husband and carer have succumbed to bad bouts of Covid-19,’ he says.
STAR Trek’s Captain Kirk, William Shatner, keen to return to the bridge after an absence of 26 years, says: ‘If [industry bosses] decide to make Kirk bisexual... it’s OK by me.’ Beam me sideways, Scotty!