Ephraim Hardcastle
CARRIE Fisher of Star Wars’ claim that her father, Hollywood star Eddie Fisher, had an affair with Princess Margaret didn’t make it into ITV’s Our Queen at 90 – a wise editing decision. 1, The Queen doesn’t enjoy being reminded of her sister’s indiscretions; 2, ITV prefers to retain its favoured-broadcaster royal status; and 3, Carrie might be exaggerating. My court source says: ‘The only Fisher I ever heard Margaret linked with was Geoffrey Fisher, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who scolded her regularly for not behaving herself. Margaret was a flirt, not a tart. Not everyone she flirted with was invited into her bed.’ DESPITE being naturalised British, Lebanese-born London lawyer Amal Clooney, 38, is poking her nose i nto the bitter US presidential race with a fund-raising dinner at which two places at the table with Hillary and Bill Clinton and the Clooneys will cost $353,000 (£250,000). Hillary’s Democrat rival, socialist Bernie Sanders, calls this ‘obscene’. Be that as it may, Amal is becoming a bigger name than George. His latest film, Hail, Caesar!, pictured, is an unfunny stinker, but she’s increasingly in demand in the real world. TOM Hiddleston achieves premature star status as The Night Manager but the £20million BBC1 adaptation of a John le Carre story won’t have impressed all readers of the spy writer’s books. As an adviser on the TV series, did le Carre sanction the line, ‘Nothing quite as pretty as napalm at night’, uttered by balding Hugh Laurie as the cartoonishly evil arms dealer Richard Roper after a munitions demonstration? In the 1979 film about the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Now, gung-ho Lt Col Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) enthuses, after a US air strike, ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’. Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery but you’d expect better for £20million. POLITICAL pariah Tony Blair has embarked on a campaign of selective exposure in the media, twice obtaining soft-soap interviews with Nick Robinson on Radio 4’s Today show as well as offering articles to newspapers about international affairs like a respected elder statesman. Over Easter, he boasted on Today about his ‘historic’ and ‘momentous’ achievements over 1998’s Good Friday Agreement, which some see as a sell-out to terrorists. A fortnight earlier, too-chummy-by-half Robinson had him rhapsodising about EU membership, saying it was time to exert ‘a bit of passion’. Robinson commented oleaginously: ‘You just did!’ Where’s John Humphrys when he’s needed? TV personality Piers Morgan taunts tycoon Lord Sugar on Twitter: ‘You sound so jealous of Donald (Trump). Is that because he’s ten times richer and a far better Apprentice host?’ Trump insists he’s worth over £8billion while his net worth is estimated by US media to be £3.2billion. Sugar’s is put at £1.4billion. Trump, who hosted The Apprentice in the US, inherited a multimillion-dollar property fortune. Sugar left school aged 16 and sold car aerials out of a van he’d bought with £50 savings. Shouldn’t man-o’-the-people Piers prefer homegrown Sugarplum?