Ephraim Hardcastle
BORIS and Carrie’s Catholic wedding prompts concern with Pope Francis’s Great Britain ambassador papal nuncio Claudio Gugerotti as devout Catholics question the PM’s credentials for marrying in Westminster Cathedral. The protesters cite Canon Law, the RC rule book which declares that any Catholic procuring an abortion incurs a latae sententiae (automatic) excommunication. Boris’s mistress Petronella Wyatt became pregnant during their affair and had a termination paid for by her lover. On that basis, many RC clerics refuse communion to worshippers. Catholic President Joe Biden, a supporter of abortion, has been refused the eucharist by some US priests and is officially a ‘Catholic in bad standing’.
TURNER Prize winner Lubaina Himid offers a solution to Tate Britain’s forced closure of its Rex Whistler Restaurant amid the clamour to remove the artist’s panoramic mural containing a tiny tethered black boy. She suggests handing the restaurant over to artists to respond to Whistler’s painting. ‘Plexiglass could be installed in front of the work and artists could draw over that,’ she says. But with the Tate losing more than £200,000 per annum from restaurant sales, might Himid recommend the inclusion of a running buffet?
SPARe a smidgen of sympathy for Tory diarist Sasha, pictured, wife of hugo Swire, who complains in The Oldie about being snubbed at dinner by Penny Mordaunt. ‘She didn’t address a single word to me. Not one. Once, Amber Rudd introduced me to Liz Truss who just stared at me like DCS Patricia Carmichael in Line of Duty, all serene and smirking as if I had single-handedly betrayed the entire sisterhood with my “wife of” status.’ Pass the port and the onion Sasha!
LAMENTING that composer Handel profited from slavery, actor Simon Callow urges no vilification for adhering to the values of his time, adding: ‘We need an annual day of atonement, a day on which the scale and savagery of this inhuman practice is acknowledged – publicly and with due solemnity – and its victims honoured, just as each year we acknowledge the dead of the two world wars.’ He added: ‘Only then might the healing commence.’ Did grandiose Simon rehearse in front of a mirror perchance?
PRINCeSS Caroline of Monaco’s estranged husband Prince ernst August of
hanover gets both barrels in next week’s Channel 5 documentary Grace Kelly’s Children, with French writer Benedicte Paviot observing: ‘Alas he doesn’t always have royal behaviour. Indeed, he has urinated in public, he’s allegedly broken the nose of a cameraman and woe betide what a crime of lese-majesty, he kissed the Queen during a banquet.’ Adds Paviot: ‘That is simply not done!’
TORY Whip Marcus Jones, wearing tails and carrying a long stick, delivers a message from the Queen to Speaker Lindsay Hoyle who, noting his snooker cue-like rod, declares: ‘Good luck in the final.’