Ephraim Hardcastle

LEONARDO DiCaprio was meant to star in The Imitation Game, which opens today with Benedict Cumberbatch as our ace wartime codebreaker Alan Turing. It was going to be a Warner Bros production but ended up being made by a small, independent company. The film’s director, bearded Norwegian Morten Tyldum, tells me: ‘I just felt Warner Bros didn’t want to make a picture about a gay man.’ In a wrenching scene, Cumberbatch confesses to his fiancée, played by Keira Knightley, that he is a homosexual. An end-note on screen says he killed himself in 1954 during government-prescribed hormone treatment after being convicted of gross indecency. Too downbeat for present-day Warner Bros, evidently. Yet the studio was ‘historically associated with socially conscious themes’, say movie historians. That was in the 1930s, however. PRIOR to David Miliband’s interview on Newsnight, the BBC’s US correspondent, Jon Sopel, said that he wasn’t allowed to ask about brother Ed or Labour Party politics. Contrast this pusillanimous approach with Sky’s interview with Tony Blair from Sierra Leone. Self-importantly, Blair said he’d only talk about the ebola crisis. Newscaster Kay Burley, pictured, cheerily ignored this, asking if he’d talked to Ed Miliband at the Remembrance Sunday service about the latter’s difficulties. Despite her persistent questions, Blair gave no information of value. But his reluctance to wax enthusiastic about his successor spoke volumes. APROPOS Ed, he quoted an aphorism of Hitler’s favourite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche – ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ – in his relaunch speech yesterday. Poor Nietzsche, who died relatively young at the age of 55, was confined to a lunatic asylum after he was found embracing a horse in the street. FORMER Tory minister Michael Portillo surprised an audience in Malton, North Yorkshire, by predicting Ed Miliband will be the next PM. According to my source: ‘He said the Tories will gain more votes than Labour but Ukip will gain at least 10 per cent, opening the door for a Labourled government with Miliband as PM. He also predicted that, since there will be no Tory majority, there will be no referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.’ Now established as a broadcaster, the famous Eurosceptic’s series on train journeys covers Europe. Fancy that! MORAL Maze star Michael Buerk – about to appear, for £120,000, in ITV’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! – has faced worse hardships. After leaving school, he says in his memoirs, ‘I became a hod carrier, carrying bricks in a three-sided box on a stick up the sides of a half-built block of flats. I was exhausted by 9am, and stayed that way for three months.’ But I wonder if fellow contestants will be tactless enough to ask what show he was thinking of when he recently criticised TV’s ‘cutting-edge tripe’.