Hardcastle
MICHAEL Fawcett, reported to the Metropolitan Police on suspicion of breaching the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925, should look nervously at the fate of Maundy Gregory – the only person ever prosecuted under the Act. Just over a century ago, Gregory was selling peerages for the equivalent of £1.2million and knighthoods for £310,000. He was fined £50, jailed for two months, subsequently bankrupted and obliged to live abroad. Heaven forbid Fawcett the Fence fetch up in his master’s bolthole in Transylvania!
WHEN Prince Charles’s friend Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz was awarded an honorary CBE in November 2016, it failed to get a mention in the court circular. Unlike Kevin Spacey. Months earlier, the actor’s meeting with Charles to get an honorary knighthood did make the circular. Clearly awestruck, Spacey posted a photo of the meeting online saying: ‘I may play a president on TV, but in real life I’m now a Sir. Thanks HRH – what a prince of a guy!’ Clarence House wasn’t impressed.
Girls Aloud warbler Nadine Coyle, pictured, will surely empathise with Kenneth Branagh. The Irish accents in his new film Belfast have been deemed incomprehensible by the Hollywood Reporter, which concludes: ‘This is a movie that definitely would benefit from subtitles.’ When Nadine appeared as a guest judge on America’s Next Top Model, subtitles were used to translate her melodious Derry brogue.
Royal-Marine-in-waiting Arthur Chatto, Princess Margaret’s grandson, joins the only other family member in the junior ranks to take the Queen’s shilling – Major the Earl of Ulster. He’s the eldest son of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. Alex Ulster, as he is known, served in the Royal Hussars and saw active service in Kosovo and Iraq. As he is 31st in the line of succession, there was little incentive to keep him far from the front line.
CHRIS Jagger’s memoir Talking to Myself, published tomorrow, reveals his most lucrative job – an advert for Lee Cooper Jeans. ‘I even had my own “stand-in” bottom,’ he writes. ‘Mine wasn’t big enough.’ Might he have asked sibling Mick, whose bum has been admired by millions on stage with The Rolling Stones, to lend him his?
John ‘Johnny Rotten’ Lydon opens his UK speaking tour with a rant against US President Joe Biden describing him as a ‘senile delinquent’. ‘My wife [Nora] is ill and she has Alzheimer’s but she is light years ahead of that fella.’ Isn’t California-based Rotten tempting fate with the charmless US immigration?
REVEALING lockdown left her trademark fringe in a state, Strictly host Claudia Winkleman tells Woman’s Weekly: ‘I was literally walking into walls and my hairdresser gave me a tutorial on how to cut my hair myself. It was rubbish, but I did it... It was like curtains.’ Pull yourself together, Claudia!
Email: john.mcentee@dailymail.co.uk