Ephraim Hardcastle
TV historian Dan Snow, 38, says that being married to heiress Lady Edwina Grosvenor, 35, sister of the billionaire 7th Duke of Westminster, gives him ‘the most extraordinary freedom not to do speaking engagements, as my colleagues have to do’. No doubt colleagues are grateful for his kind (if condescending) thoughts.
WHEN Emma Freud, 55, and her daughter Scarlett Curtis – respectively, daughter and granddaughter of Sir Clement Freud – appeared in the Sunday Times’ Relative Values interview slot recently, no mention was made of the late Liberal MP. Last year Freud, who died aged 84 in 2009, was accused by three women of rape and child sexual abuse. Surely he can’t have gone unmentioned because Emma and Scarlett were interviewed by a relative-by-marriage, Caroline Hutton, 49, an ex-wife of Emma’s brother, the controversial PR man Matthew Freud? A small world, isn’t it?
THE Princess Royal and her nephew Prince Harry will be in Twickenham’s royal box on Saturday for the Six Nations, England-Scotland game. Princess Anne is the long-time patron of the Scottish Rugby Union. It’s Harry’s first game since taking over from the Queen as patron of the RFU. Both are enthusiastic supporters. Let’s hope loyalties don’t get out of hand in the royal box.
MIRIAM Gonzalez Durantez, 48, pictured, aka Mrs Nick Clegg, was sent an invitation to an International Women’s Day event addressed in her husband’s name. She says she found this ‘ironic’. The smiling beauty, unlikely to have become a guest on TV shows here if she hadn’t married the leader of a political party, had no proper answer when Sky’s Adam Boulton inquired: ‘What’s wrong with being called Mrs Clegg?’
TORY Europhile and rebel Lord Heseltine, 83, axed as a government adviser, complains on TalkRadio: ‘They dismiss me as an old f**t. The treatment of John Major was appalling. They do the same to me, and to Ken Clarke.’ Did he expect a bouquet of roses?
FORMER BBC boss Mark Thompson, now chief executive of The New York Times, saw his pay fall 43 per cent last year. He made $4.9million (£4million) compared with $8.7million (£7.1million) in 2015. ‘It’s payment by results – a system from which his former BBC colleagues are blessedly immune,’ says my source. Still, the ex-BBC director-general, who says he didn’t know what Jimmy Savile was up to, has made more than £16million since joining The New York Times in 2012.
UNPARLIAMENTARY language includes git, blackguard, coward and guttersnipe. What, then, to make of Mhairi Black, MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, who appeared to mouth: ‘You talk s***e, hen’ at a Tory under-secretary? The youngest MP elected since 1667, great things were expected of her. On this coarse showing, that future may already be behind her.