Ephraim Hardcastle

WHILE the late John Lennon is remembered for his ‘Bed-In’ peace protest with wife Yoko Ono in 1969 – at The Hilton, Amsterdam – his widow is unlikely to approve of an upcoming auction. Another bed slept in by the former Beatle is to be sold in Denver later this month – the brass one he shared with former PA, May Pang, at the Caribou Ranch, Colorado, in 1974, during a temporary split from Ms Ono. The likely selling price? About £200 – the dregs of celebrity culture.

THE Cumbrian novels of TV arts expert, and Labour peer Lord ( Melvyn ) Bragg, 75, who hails from Wigton, are mocked by some snooty critics. ‘Women in shawls ’oop North, weirdly girly,’ says one. Nevertheless the Melvyn corpus is now the subject of a 320-page volume, Grains Of Sand: Melvyn Bragg’s Cumbrian Novels. ‘An ambitious and searching study,’ sighs the Times Literary Supplement.

DAMIAN Lewis, 43, who plays Henry VIII in the BBC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, pictured, says he’s not playing the role ‘as the womanising, syphilitic, bloated, genocidal Elvis character that people probably expect’. A pal calls telling me he’s at ‘an Elvis farm in Austria’ – a reference to the £4,500-aweek Mayr Clinic in Klagenfurt. Poor Elvis has become a synonym for obesity.

GERMAN-owned Lidl offers cut-price kilts (£29.99) for Burns Night (January 25), made by the Edinburgh-based Gold Brothers, run by Malap, Surinder, Galab and Dildar Singh, who also retail Chinesemade kilts at £19.99. Scottish kilt makers want EU legislation protecting authentic Caledonian clothing. Haggis makers feel the same. If Cornish pasties have it, why not the kilt and the haggis?

SHADOW chancellor Ed Balls is disparaged in the Financial Times, which says: ‘Britain’s Labour Party needs a new economics team.’ A fine way to treat one of their former economics writers!

PORTSMOUTH South’s Tory election candidate Flick Drummond has a problem. ‘When you put “Flick” on a poster, from a distance it reads like something unfortunate,’ says my party source. Is using her real name, Felicity, rather than a nickname, out of the question?

BRAD Pitt has the fingernails of his right hand painted to remind him how much his children love him, says an associate, explaining that each is allotted one nail to decorate in his or her own colour – one each to Maddox, Shiloh, Zahara and Pax while the twins, Knox and Vivienne, share one between them. Isn’t life grand?

VETERAN songwriter Stevie Nicks, 66, Rolling Stone magazine’s Queen of Rock – she has sold more than 140 million albums – now rules out romancing men her own age, saying: ‘What if I fall in love and they die?’ Neither will she compete for a toyboy. ‘I’ve narrowed it down to nobody.’ A challenge for any toyboys looking for a rich benefactor.