Hardcastle Ephraim
BEFORE succeeding his mother, King Charles was incandescent when her dresser Angela Kelly published private photographs of the Queen with her hands in her pockets. Charles had deemed the snaps, taken for a Royal Collection photo shoot, inappropriate and they weren’t published. Kelly used the unseen pics in her 2019 book The Queen, The dresser and the Wardrobe. ‘Her Majesty started striking a series of poses, slipping her hands in and out of her pockets and placing them on to her hips, mimicking the stance of a professional model,’ she explained. Ingrid Seward, in My Mother and I, reveals: ‘It was enough to incur Charles’s wrath. He thoroughly disliked what he considered was taking advantage of her good nature.’ Might that explain Kelly’s departure, shortly after HM’s death, from her grace-and-favour Windsor home to a cottage in the Peak district?
NINE-YEAR-OLD Princess Anne was indifferent when her mother told her she was expecting another baby four months before Andrew was born. In a handwritten letter to her midwife Sister Helen Rowe – to be auctioned for £4,800 in Germany on Saturday – the 33-year-old Queen wrote that Charles was excited, adding: ‘Anne is getting more used to the idea now!’ But was Prince Philip also lukewarm? ‘It has taken the parents a long time to get used to the idea, too, being so very much out of the baby world,’ added HM.
TEXTING her undying affection to husband ex-Scottish rugby international Kenny, Gabby logan, pictured, tip-tapped ‘ I love you’. ‘I had found the name Kenny in my phone contacts,’ she tells Chatabix podcast. ‘ But I’d just told Kenny dalglish I loved him.’
CLEARING her throat to spout at the Paris Olympics, Clare Balding remains haunted by her 2009 Grand National interview with winning jockey Liam Treadwell, asking if he was going to spend his prize money on having his teeth repaired. ‘I did an awful thing and I genuinely didn’t mean any harm,’ she says. Treadwell, who subsequently got a free set of new teeth from an obliging dentist, died in 2020 from an accidental drug overdose. ‘What’s happened since makes it very difficult to talk about,’ adds a tearful Clare. ‘Liam’s mum and I are in touch fairly regularly. Sorry, I just can’t believe he’s not here.’
FORMER labour minister Frank Field, who has died aged 81, predicted misfortune for old foe Gordon Brown’s premiership just months before the latter became PM. Cruelly comparing the Scot to the insane character in Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, Field observed: ‘Allowing Gordon Brown into Number 10 would be like letting Mrs Rochester out of the attic.’