Hardcastle
BELOW stairs staff at Buckingham Palace are enjoying a flutter in a sweepstake entitled ‘when will Meg Return?’, trying to predict precisely when the duchess of sussex next comes to Britain. Footmen, pages and maids have been wagering £10 each to select dates in the winner-takes-all lottery. dates surrounding the climax of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebration next year have been snapped up, with an alarming number of bets on ‘never’.
RELUCTANT royal Katharine Worsley’s 1961 marriage to Edward, Duke of Kent, was opposed by his mother Princess Marina because the bride was a commoner, according to Saturday’s Channel 5 documentary The Forgotten Royal. Biographer Christopher Warwick claims that Marina also didn’t want to lose her title. ‘She would be the Dowager Duchess of Kent and that was a position she didn’t relish,’ he says. Marina managed to retain her title while Katharine, 88, renounced royal duties for music teaching and celebrated her 60th wedding anniversary in June.
EAGER to fast-forward his lunch with the Financial Times, andrew Neil alarms interrogator Janine Gibson by ordering two starters and devouring them before she gets to her main course of cod. ‘Panicking that there are 48 years of tumultuous career to get through, i ignore this signal,’ she wails, adding: ‘Chewing each mouthful so long that even the most fastidious dietitian would be impressed, i begin to extract the story of how Neil quit the BBC for GB News.’ Checkmate to andrew for outmanoeuvring Janine on the menu choices in a chippy interview.
LOOPHOLE lawyer Nick Freeman, boasting that he feels no guilt that court work took him away from son Ben and daughter Sophie when they were growing up, bizarrely criticises Fiona Bruce, pictured, for expressing regret about doing the same. He describes her admission as ‘pointless, self-indulgent and disingenuous’, telling Cheshire Voice: ‘I remember representing David Beckham in a successful appeal to get his eight-month driving ban overturned. It was Ben’s nativity play that day, but work came first.’ He adds: ‘If Ben minded that I arrived after the Three Wise Men, he hasn’t ever said.’ Deep waters.
DAMIAN Lewis, grieving six months after the loss of his wife Helen McCrory, is heartened by the discovery of a previously unknown audio recording of the pair reading love poems at the 2014 Cheltenham Literary Festival. Confirming the find, poetry anthologist allie esiri tells Radio 4: ‘after Helen died damian and i were reminiscing and he was saying, “Oh, i wonder if maybe someone did record it?”’ she adds: ‘it is unbelievably moving.’
TORY hard man David ‘knuckleduster’ Davis was unimpressed with 007 Daniel Craig’s opening escape in No Time To Die where he grabs a rope and leaps over the edge of a bridge, seemingly hundreds of feet, to safety. ‘It’s bloody ridiculous,’ scoffs ex-SAS reservist Davis. ‘His arms would have been ripped from his shoulder blades on impact.’ Is it too late for ‘DD’, an evergreen 72, and who can still do 100 press-ups, to audition to replace Craig as the ‘silver surfer’ new Bond?