Ephraim Hardcastle
TORY MP George Hollingberry, 52, PPS to Home Secretary Theresa May, raises a delicate issue in the Portsmouth News, his local paper. He says the demise of the Queen ‘will put the monarchy’s position and its future sharply into perspective’. And he wonders if Prince Charles will be accepted as her successor. Hollingberry’s message will certainly excite the activists at Republic working to abolish the monarchy.
COLOURFUL broadcaster Gyles Brandreth, 68, who revels in sharing details of his daily life, muses on social media: ‘I started my day in a very nice sound studio in Soho. Once upon a time it was a brothel.’ How does he know? ‘I knew [the late Soho strip club king] Paul Raymond and he took me on a tour of Soho 40 years ago,’ he claims. Frisky Brandreth doesn’t mention that he was taken on a tour of live sex shows in Copenhagen by the late dotty Earl of Longford in 1971.
THE Prime Minister boasts on TV that he’s ‘a fighter, not a quitter’. Where have we heard the phrase before? From Labour’s serpentine fixer Peter Mandelson on June 7, 2001, after learning that – despite having been forced out of his cabinet job after the Hinduja passport scandal – he had saved his Hartlepool seat. Cameron modelled himself on Tony Blair. Mandelson too, it now seems.
TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp, 44, pictured, admits to readers of My Weekly magazine that she is outspoken, arguing that ‘when you’re in the public eye, you have a responsibility to talk about matters that are important to you’. Quite so, but the fruitily spoken daughter of Charles Allsopp – the 6th Baron Hindlip – irritates class-conscious folk. And a recent suggestion that young women should focus on finding a boyfriend and getting pregnant rather than university infuriated feminists. She protested: ‘So bloody bored of people who accuse me of being retrograde and then talk about who my dad is. Dark Ages.’ A critic who sneered that she was married to ‘a millionaire property developer’ was told: ‘I’m not married, you f***wit!’
THE BBC is devising an elaborate TV tribute to Dame Barbara Windsor to mark her 80th birthday next year – evidently a more important project than celebrating the 90th birthday of the Queen. The Carry On actress, who is cooperating with former EastEnders writer Tony Jordan on a documentary about her life and times, confides: ‘I was particularly taken by the way he wants to tell my tale.’ Let’s hope it isn’t too sugary. Surely we’d savour details of thrice-married Dame Barbara’s 21-year union with former gangster Ronnie Knight, as well as her romances with George Best, Bee Gee Maurice Gibb and Carry On co-star Sid James.
HAVING mentioned the Welsh nationalist bombings during the 1969 investiture of the Prince of Wales, which caused the Queen to take to her bed with ‘nervous exhaustion’, I ought to add that royal doctors devised a more tactful description of her indisposition. We were told she had a ‘feverish cold’ and all engagements were cancelled. My source says: ‘There was one upside. It meant that the Queen was spared the Wimbledon ladies’ final between Ann Jones and Billie Jean King. HM, famously, has no interest in tennis.’