Ephraim Hardcastle

OFF to India again on a national tour, ex-Tory MP and best-selling author Jeffrey Archer, 76, claims he enjoys enormous popularity on the sub-continent. ‘There will be 3,000 people outside the hall not able to get in,’ he predicted of a previous visit. ‘There will be a couple of thousand at the airport. People say, “It’s the greatest day of my life”.’ Might we have failed to make a big enough fuss of the old lag? RECENT guests at the Wiltshire cottage rented by Labour peer Peter Mandelson, 63, from a hedge fund pal, Nat Rothschild, say that – post Brexit – the New Labour guru seems ‘a misery guts these days, with little sense of humour’. My source adds: ‘His (Brazilian) friend Reinaldo da Silva, 43, does the hosting. He’s extremely good company with a wicked sense of humour.’ Isn’t it time Reinaldo made an honest man of Lord Mandelson? DOWNTON Abbey’s Lady Mary, Essexborn actress Michelle Dockery, 34, pictured, plays shameless criminal Letty Raines in a new TV series, Good Behaviour, in which she strips naked to seduce and distract a contract killer. ‘I think some people will be shocked by Letty,’ she frets. Carson the butler for one. FRANCIS Ford Coppola’s new book, The Godfather Notebook, about making the 1972 film, says he instigated the real-life romance between Al Pacino and his wife in the film, Diane Keaton. ‘I took a room at the St Regis Hotel and I had them order room service. Then I left them alone and I went home.’ Ms Keaton has since put Pacino in his place, saying: ‘He wasn’t the love of my life – he was the love of that time of my life.’ OUR most likeable former James Bond, Sir Roger Moore, 89, recalls: ‘My first week in theatre, after I came out of the Army, the director said to me, “You’re not very good. Smile when you come on”. So I smiled – and I’ve spent my life smiling.’ OLD Etonian actor Eddie Redmayne, 34, Oscar-winning star of JK Rowling’s new film Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, says: ‘I’m only an actor, who cares what I think, frankly? Sometimes, politically, people don’t want to know.’ BO Derek, 59, who appeared in a muchcriticised 1989 comedy film called Ghosts Can’t Do It with the current US president-elect Donald Trump, says of him: ‘Every once in a while there’s a person for a time and obviously this is it.’ On Trump’s acting she adds: ‘It was fun, he was great, it was a cameo.’ FORMER European Council president Herman Van Rompuy, 69, known as Rumpy Pumpy and now enjoying a bumper Brussels pension, has teamed up with Belgian singer Dana Winner to compose a new album called Love Always Wins. EU critic Nigel Farage has said Rompuy ‘has all the charisma of a damp rag’.