Ephraim Hardcastle
THE King’s retreat to Sandringham and absence from this week’s Royal Windsor Horse Show, an event cherished by his mother, poignantly marks the post-Coronation regime change. Until last year, when illness kept her away, the Queen had never missed it. The first show in 1943, to raise money for the war effort, was attended by her, with sister Margaret and her parents. It raised enough to buy 78 Typhoon planes. As well as horses, dogs were involved but in 1944 a lurcher invaded the Royal enclosure and helped himself to some chicken from the King’s luncheon plate. George VI was volubly upset and canines were outlawed. The late Queen, a dog lover, maintained the ban and they’ve never been allowed since.
GABBY socialite Kathy Lette’s Coronation joke about tiny Pacific island Tuvalu prompts a protest from foreign affairs minister Simon Kofe. Asked by Anna Botting on Sky News about Tuvalu remaining in the Commonwealth, Kathy quipped: ‘Tuvalu! Yeah. Well they’re about to go underwater. So, snorkels on.’ An irate Kofe asks how anyone could find humour in the ‘potential loss of entire countries and cultures due to climate change’, adding: ‘It’s beyond comprehension and completely unacceptable.’ Tin hat on, Lette!
EVERGREEN Jane Asher, maintaining her Trappist-like silence about her romance with Sir Paul McCartney, describes the ‘best kiss of her life’ aged
13 when filming The Greengage Summer in France. ‘I was kissed by a local boy called Jean Jacques and I can still remember the thrill,’ sighs Jane, pictured. And Macca isn’t even her celebrity crush: ‘That is’, she says, ‘Harrison Ford at the time of The Fugitive. He was perfection.’
SEEN as the epitome of Sixties cool, Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones has been outed as a nerd by film-maker Nick Broomfield who asked him for his autograph on a train when he was a 14-yearold schoolboy. ‘I went in to the compartment to meet a rabble-rouser,’ Nick, whose documentary The Stones And Brian Jones appears on BBC2, tells Radio Times. ‘He turned out to be a train-spotter.’
DAME Prue Leith’s son Danny Kruger won’t thank her for revealing the secrets of their joint occupation of a Notting Hill house before he was an MP. ‘I had the middle floor and he had the ground floor,’ she recalls. ‘He’d come and help himself and not pay. He’d swipe the champagne. More irritatingly he’d swipe the loo paper often.’ Too much information, mum?
PRINCESS Anne, acting as Gold Stick in Waiting, rode behind the Gold State Coach on her trusted steed Falkland on the return journey to Buckingham Palace. Having a more precarious ride was Major Ed van der Lande who escorted the King and Queen to the Abbey. The Life Guards officer was allocated temperamental nag Javelin, known at his Knightsbridge barracks stall as ‘the colonel killer’. Fortuitously van der Lande didn’t landey on his bottom on The Mall.