Ephraim Hardcastle
THROUGHOUT her reign the Queen has sent discreet signals to courtiers via her handbag. Whether she needs anything, from a drink to an emergency exit, staff know how to interpret her wishes via how she is holding her Launer. Now, notes a courtier, she has instituted a new set of signals for her closest aides via her walking stick. Although she still carries her handbag, the stick is now the principle conduit for discreet signalling. Says my source: ‘The stick, which HM prefers to hold rather than use, has taken on a life of its own.’
WILL Camilla become the first commoner Queen Consort since Catherine Parr married Henry VIII in 1543? As the granddaughter of the third Baron Ashcombe and claiming descent from the Earls of Albemarle and the Dukes of Richmond, Camilla’s commoner credentials are compromised. In addition she and Charles are distantly related via the second Duke of Newcastle. There is some debate about whether the Queen Mother was a commoner or not, but we may have to wait until Kate is crowned before we have another truly common Queen Consort.
ERIN Doherty’s sublime performance in the BBC1 drama Chloe raises fascinating issues about ‘culturally sensitive casting’ in the wake of the row over Helen Mirren, a non-Jew, playing former Israeli PM Golda Meir. In real life, Erin, pictured, is in a partnership with fellow actress Sophie Melville. To prepare for her explicit sex scenes with two different men, Erin (who played Princess Anne in The Crown), undoubtedly availed herself of the advice of an ‘intimacy coach’, whose services now seem de rigueur on film sets.
TIMES columnist Melanie Phillips’ rant against tattoos, noting they were once confined to ‘navvies, convicts and soldiers’, backfires monumentally as she learns of the dragon and tiger tattoos on the arms of King George V. The Queen’s grandfather also had a hunting scene across his back with horses, hounds and huntsmen. The fox was not visible, although its brush was depicted above the separation of the royal buttocks. In mitigation George, while not a soldier, was a Royal Navy veteran.
RACHEL Johnson mourns the banishment of Sloane Rangers: ‘Ever since London became the world capital of new and dirty money,’ she wails, ‘Sloanes have been flung out centrifugally from Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Chelsea – even from Fulham – by the tech moguls, oligarchs, and Chinese and Indian billionaires to outer areas such as Battersea, Queen’s Park, Wandsworth and Ravenscourt Park.’ Onions all round, Rachel.
BLUR manager Andy Ross, who created the 1995 Britpop battle with Oasis, so infuriated singer Axl Rose that he personally delivered a note to Ross’s office stating, histrionically: ‘You’re a dead man.’ How did Ross, who has died aged 65, offend the Guns N’ Roses frontman? Axl sounded, he noted, ‘like a hamster with its testicles trapped in a door’.