Ephraim Hardcastle

THE Queen and Theresa May ‘got on famously’ during the latter’s two-day visit to Balmoral, I am assured. ‘There hasn’t been a PM since Harold Wilson who entered so gamely into the outdoor pursuits, parlour games and well-regulated rituals,’ says my source. ‘This included the obligatory charades after dinner where all hope of dignity dies – thanks to royal cocktails, mixed at double-strength.’ No doubt First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and her SNP chief executive husband Peter Murrell joined in with similar gusto during their visit on Monday. THROUGHOUT his tenure as Prime Minister, David Cameron secretly recorded 53 hours of audio tape with The Times’s leader writer Danny Finkelstein, which will now form the basis of Dave’s ‘£1million’ autobiography. Asked if his editor (John Witherow) knew of the undercover deal, Finkelstein – ennobled by Cameron in 2013 – replies opaquely: ‘An incredibly interesting thing to have done. A privilege and riveting.’ During this period, Lord Finkelstein – he calls himself Danny the Fink on Twitter – was often on TV, as a political commentator who seemingly knew no more of what was in the PM’s mind than anyone else. NOW that Lord Ivar Mountbatten, 53, has said he’s in a same sex relationship, might some younger royal consider this option? Unmarried Prince Harry, 32, pictured, was propositioned by another young man when out in Notting Hill with his then girlfriend, Cressida Bonas, in 2013. Pink News reported that a certain Vincenzo Iannellio passed him a note with his telephone number, claiming afterwards that the prince ‘promised he’ll call me if he changes his mind about women’. KNIGHTED after finding fame as a snivelling manservant, Baldrick, in the TV comedy Blackadder, Sir Tony Robinson recalls going to Buckingham Palace in 2013 to collect his ‘K’. There were ‘a few people there I vaguely recognised’, he says, including ‘a po-faced Liberal who was being made a Companion of Honour’. How discourteous to Sir Ming Campbell. MEMBERS of the posh Hurlingham Club are angry over a £19.9million redevelopment which involves closing the swimming pool for two years and cutting down two ‘magnificent’ lime trees. A member tells me: ‘Some members might chain themselves to the trees to save them.’ Including club stalwart Jeffrey Archer, preferably. FORMER Tory Cabinet minister Michael Portillo, 63, was seen scything in the Carpathian Mountains on his Great Continental Railway Journeys TV show last night. But he failed miserably to trim the pasture. At least we were spared seeing him stripped to the waist, Poldark-style. BARRY Gibb, 70, the last surviving Bee Gee, recalls meeting the then BBC TV host Linda Gray, his wife for 46 years and mother of his five children, in the BBC canteen. Afterwards they become romantically entwined, he says, ‘in Doctor Who’s phone box’. But he insists: ‘We were standing up – let’s be clear about that – and we were surrounded by Daleks.’ Methinks Barry doth protest too much.