Ephraim Hardcastle
After sexual predator Rolf harris was jailed, he wrote to a senior member of the late Queen’s household protesting his innocence, insisting that his appeal against conviction (subsequently dropped) would result in his immediate release and suggesting that it would be inappropriate for his honours to be removed. he asked that the Queen, who he had painted in 2005, be appraised of his letter. She was in Balmoral at the time. It was one of the rare letters received at the Palace that never received a reply.
A YEAR before Harris was first arrested on sexual assault charges in 2013, his name was suggested for the Order of Merit, the elite group of 24 academics, artists and philanthropists appointed solely by the monarch. Fortunately, the Queen selected David Hockney and former PM of Australia John Howard to fill the two vacancies. It turned out to be a shrewd move.
Celebrating her 90th birthday, Joan Collins names Gemma arterton, pictured, as the actress she’d most like to play her in a mooted tV biography series about the eventful lives of herself and novelist sister Jackie. Good news for Gemma, 37, but grim reading for Liz hurley, 57. She played Joan’s daughter in the series the Royals, often gushing about how well they got on – and must be disappointed her name wasn’t in the frame.
BORIS loather Polly Toynbee, in her new memoir, recalls meeting a young mother in Oxford in 1964 with her two-month-old baby ‘lying naked on a bath mat, kicking his feet in the air, round, pink and fat, with a remarkable shock of electrically bright blond hair’. Polly adds: ‘I look back with a morbid incredulity at what that baby grew up to be. It’s a not particularly good joke to surprise people with the fact that I am one of the many women to have seen Boris Johnson naked.’
John Cleese’s attempt to cash in on the success of Fawlty towers with a revival doesn’t impress timothy West, husband of Prunella ‘Sybil Fawlty’ Scales. With Prunella suffering from alzheimer’s, timothy criticised Cleese’s resurrection of Basil for a cringeworthy Specsavers ad in 2016. ‘I felt very sad,’ he remarked. ‘to do it again shows he is a bit pushed, I think. he has the divorce and now he has got the new one [wife]. I think he has lost his way.’
ROUSTABOUT Spectator Low Life columnist Jeremy Clarke, who has died aged 66, is to be honoured by his Cheltenham races benefactor Piers Pottinger with a memorial lunch. ‘My favourite memory of Jeremy after a refreshing day at the races is having to guide him a mile from the course to our car as he could only walk backwards,’ remembers PR supremo Piers. ‘He could talk lucidly but not walk forward. Back at the house he had to climb the stairs backwards too. It took an hour’s snooze and a large gin for his forward propulsion to be restored.’ Rest easy Jeremy.