Ephraim Hardcastle
CHANNEL 4’s film tonight about the then Princess Elizabeth partying in VEDay London – the Queen’s Big Night out – wasn’t the most significant royal event in 1945. It was the appointment of Anthony Blunt as surveyor of the King’s Pictures, says a royal informant, explaining: ‘Blunt was used by George VI in a 1945 mission to Germany to recover as much documentation as possible that linked the Duke of Windsor with Hitler and the wider Nazi regime. He was duly rewarded. on the death of her father, in 1952, the Queen honoured Blunt with the CVo (the Royal Victorian order) and, three years later, at the request of the Queen Mother, the KCVo. But HM was embarrassed in 1979 when the new Prime Minister, Margaret thatcher, exposed him as a former soviet spy – a fact already known to the Royal Household.’
DAME Julie Andrews, 79, says that her late husband, film director Blake Edwards – prior to them meeting – told friends ‘she probably has violets between her legs’. The Mary Poppins star says she responded by sending him ‘a bunch of purple flowers’. Romance blossomed. They married in 1969. Isn’t romance grand?
soCIALItE heiress Jemima Goldsmith, 41, tells her fans she gave a teddy bear to a godson for his first birthday and was told by the infant’s mother that it was ‘a transitional object’. Ms Goldsmith adds: ‘My transitional object was Imran Khan.’ A somewhat disrespectful reference to her first husband, Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, 62, pictured. He’s the father of her sons, sulaiman, 18, and Kasim,16.
CONVALESCING after surgery, BBC political editor Nick Robinson mocks Boris Johnson’s often-chaotic performance on BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show, telling Twitter fans: ‘Wonder how many Tories still think Boris is their under-used secret weapon after this performance on Marr’s sofa?’ Perhaps Boris, 50, will be ‘weaponised’ by Labour?
JEREMY Paxman, 64, says he doesn’t watch his old BBC2 show, Newsnight, adding: ‘My idea of fun is to go to bed at 10.30pm and read a book.’ Wouldn’t it be kinder to old colleagues if he fibbed and said he remained a viewer?
BONKBUSTER author Jackie Collins says she spoke at a literary soiree hosted by former President George W Bush’s mother, Barbara, in Houston, Texas. ‘What a great night,’ enthuses salty-tongued Ms Collins, 77. ‘W’ himself was present. History records that the presidential bibliophile was reading The Pet Goat along with children in a Florida schoolroom in 2001 when told about terrorist attacks on America. Amazon offers for £7.50 a volume about his presidential pensées, The George W Bush Coloring (sic) Book.
EX-tory MP Ann Widdecombe’s elephantine moves on strictly Come Dancing startled the nation but she was less co-operative, I hear, as a Victorian kitchen maid in the four-part BBC1 reality show 24 Hours In the Past, starting tonight. Ms W, 67, protested: ‘I am not skinning rabbits and I’m not gutting pheasants. I’m a former vicepresident of the RsPCA and I regard that as profoundly revolting. I’m sorry.’