Ephraim Hardcastle
WILL King Charles wear the Scottish crown when he visits Edinburgh in July to receive the Honours of Scotland? In 1953 the Queen attended the ceremony but wasn’t crowned to prevent talk of a Scottish coronation. This time, with Scotland having its own parliament, there is pressure on the King to don the diadem. Some fear this would play into the hands of nationalists, while others suggest it would show respect to Scotland. At least HM is honouring his Scottish roots by wearing a kilt.
WAS the late Queen envious of her mother’s relationship with Poet Laureate Ted Hughes? When he died his replacement, Andrew Motion, met the monarch and was told: ‘Ted Hughes and my mother did see quite a bit of each other. Actually, I’d like to have a poet laureate who paid attention to me.’
MOTION, who relinquished the job in 2009, admits that he deliberately omitted from his Philip Larkin biography a claim that Larkin’s shyness and neuroses were attributed to his abnormally large penis. ‘It’s the only thing that I deliberately left out,’ he says. ‘I decided not to mention that precisely because I thought everybody would just write about that and not about the poems.’
DOES Matt Hancock believe he owns the copyright of all his WhatsApp messages? Westminster venue the Emmanuel Centre seems to think so, having cancelled The Lockdown Files, Isabel Oakeshott’s dramatisation of his Covid messages. She claims he warned the venue that it should not be ‘profiting from stolen material’. She wails that his adoption of the moral high ground when it comes to money-making is a fresh reminder of his brass neck. And to think they used to be chums!
KRISH Majumdar, producer of Bafta winner Kate Winslet’s film I Am Ruth, is grilled awkwardly by Radio 4’s Mishal Husain on the casting of Kate’s daughter Mia Threapleton, pictured. Said Mishal: ‘We do have a lot of children of actors who get breaks and succeed.’ Majumdar insisted Mia had to audition separately to Kate, adding: ‘Mia was there completely on merit and her performance was terrific.’ Nothing to see here!
THE last thing Phillip Schofield needs is a rant from Lady Colin Campbell, whose pals call her Georgie, describing him as ‘a jerk of the highest order’. Her ladyship, 73, is settling scores, claiming he upset her at the 2016 National Television Awards. ‘He tried to push me over,’ she wails. ‘What man tries to push over a woman, almost an elderly woman, as I was 66?’ Whatever else she is, Georgie is no pussy!
RESPONDING to reports that one in ten schoolchildren want to change gender, Gyles Brandreth, 75, recalls: ‘When I was nine I wanted to be Brigitte Bardot. I remember walking down the street, looking at models [in department store windows] and thinking, “That would suit me”.’ Had she known, Brigitte, then 22, would surely have opted to be trainee polymath Gyles rather than a sex symbol!