Ephraim Hardcastle
THE latest Honours List is viewed with the usual mixture of derision and disinterest. Don’t the real honours belong to those who politely decline them? Such as John Freeman, who has died aged 99. A wartime Army officer, Labour MP, TV interviewer, ambassador, businessman and university professor, he was eligible several times over for a knighthood or peerage. But the only bauble he accepted was an MBE in 1943, when he was 28, for his service with the Coldstream Guards and Rifle Brigade. ‘He was offered knighthoods on a number of occasions but always turned the honour down because it wasn’t his kind of thing,’ says his friend, historian Paul Johnson. Freeman’s funeral is on January 12 in Barnes, south-west London. The BBC says it is likely to organise a memorial service later in the year.
HEIRESS Jemima Khan, 40, always the blue stocking, muses on Twitter, possibly about ex- boyfriend Russell Brand: ‘ There should be a German word for that feeling you get when you realise you have accidentally sent someone the wrong text message. More specifically: when you realise you have accidentally sent a text message about someone to them.’ ‘Embarrassment’ evidently isn’t intellectual enough for Ms Khan.
THE torrid weekend romance in 1971 of rising star Sinead Cusack, then 23, and Manchester United’s George Best, who was 25, is to be the subject of a new movie by producer Stephen Evans, who made Seve (about the late Spanish golf champion) and The Madness of King George. Best was meant to be appearing with his team against Chelsea. Instead, he was shacked up with Sinead, pictured at the time. Man United manager Matt Busby was furious. Evans tells me: ‘Sinead is a friend and I’d like her to play the housekeeper who looked after George and herself while photographers camped outside the flat and Busby fumed about the absence of his star player.’ So who’ll play Busby? I suggest Ms Cusack’s intense, Oscar-winning husband, Jeremy Irons.
PUBLICITY-addicted Kris Jenner, mother-manager – or ‘momager’ in their creepy jargon – of the US reality TV show Keeping Up With the Kardashians, ends her marriage to former Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner. Comic Seth Meyers comments: ‘They ask only that the media allow them to handle this family matter publicly.’
ASKED about his ‘best memory’ of starring with old pal Sir Michael Caine in the lamentably unfunny 1990 comedy movie Bullseye!, Sir Roger Moore replies: ‘Being paid.’ Radio Times said it was ‘a career low for all concerned’.
‘NICK Clegg’s toast, isn’t he?’ suggests Radio 4’s Edward Stourton to the Lib Dem deputy leader, Sir Malcolm Bruce. Who replies: ‘Nick Clegg isn’t toast. Nick Clegg hasn’t been weak, he hasn’t been pathetic. He’s been strong, he’s been resilient.’ If so, would it require Bruce to assert it so vehemently?
FOGHORN-voiced actor Brian Blessed, 78, predicts: ‘One day I’ll go into space. I’ll make it to Mars, definitely.’ What have the little green men ever done to deserve this?