Ephraim Hardcastle
CLARENCE House may think that Camilla’s crowning is a done deal after the Queen gave her backing, but the queen-consort-inwaiting faces a rocky few months. Prince Harry’s ‘intimate memoir’ this autumn is expected to be critical of the womanwho-would-be-queen with damaging pre-publication morsels likely to enliven the summer. Crucially, the effects of Harry’s memoir will depend on how popular he is in the court of public opinion at the time of the book’s appearance. After his curious ‘protect the Queen’ outburst, is his star on the wane?
ROYAL scribe Tina Brown casts a smidgen of doubt on Camilla’s official acquisition of all the Queen Mother’s jewellery by recounting her visit to the home of former page, ‘Backstairs Billy’ Tallon. ‘I saw a draping of pearls that he said belonged to the Queen Mother wrapped around a statuette,’ she writes. ‘There were tables groaning with medals, engraved objects and discarded bibelots — whether bestowed or pilfered was anybody’s guess.’ Should Camilla do a stocktake?
ANDREW Marr, pictured, outs himself as a nine-year-old Maoist who wrote to the Chinese Embassy explaining he wanted to set up a cell of the Chinese Communist Party. ‘They sent these huge boxes and there were hundreds of little red books so I distributed them to the entire school,’ he tells a podcast. So why did he do it? ‘There was a Cultural Revolution going on. They made the teachers pick the crops so I looked at mine and thought it was a splendid idea.’
PAYING a tearful farewell to his wife Elizabeth Harris at her funeral in St Matthew’s Westminster yesterday, Jonathan Aitken recalled her last moments when he encouraged her to survive until the lavish party planned for her 86th birthday on May 1. ‘With a gorgeous smile she replied, “You bet”,’ Jonathan told a congregation including Lord and Lady Archer and Lord Lamont. He added: ‘Alas she lost the bet. Those were her last words.’
AT the funeral, an emotional Jared Harris, linking arms with brothers Damian and Jamie round his mother’s catafalque, recalled his stepfather Jonathan’s neardeath experience last year when he was rushed to hospital. After telling Elizabeth that the next time she might see him would be at his funeral, she replied: ‘My darling, I know just what to wear.’
DUBBED ‘Captain Underpants’ after he was discovered posing in his briefs on a gay dating site, Chris Bryant eagerly takes to the airwaves to spout about fellow MP Neil Parish’s porn disgrace. On his 2003 embarrassment he concludes: ‘It was a wound, but it’s a rather charming scar now.’
WAS the Duke of Windsor one of the celestial residents welcoming French nightclub hostess Regine Zylberberg, who has died aged 92, to the Pearly Gates? They were acquaintances. Bertie once asked her to teach him the Twist.