Hardcastle Ephraim
WAS the departure of devout Christian Tim Farron as Lib Dem leader provoked by Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman’s probing questions about his attitude to gay sex? His answer – that personal morality didn’t matter, ‘to understand Christianity is to understand that we are all sinners’ – angered gay rights zealots. But would Ms Newman ask a Muslim leader if the violent persecution of homosexuals practised by many members of their faith could ever be justified?
ALLY McBeal star Calista Flockhart, 52, celebrating seven years’ marriage to Harrison Ford, 74, after dating him for eight years, enthuses in an interview: ‘Wow, I keep forgetting he’s 22 years older than me. It doesn’t factor into our relationship at all. I like the way he looks first thing in the morning. It’s not handsome, it’s more cute. He looks like a little boy. The truth is I sometimes feel very much older.’ As a Hollywood cynic wrote a month into Zsa Zsa Gabor’s sixth marriage (she had nine): ‘Who said it wouldn’t last?’
SIR Cliff Richard, 76, reflecting on his legal battle with the police and BBC over discredited sex abuse claims, says he had to take them seriously – ‘so I got great lawyers who are seriously expensive!’ He’s still in dispute with the BBC, which had broadcast live coverage of the (pointless) 2014 raid on his Berkshire home. In the 1980s, the then director-general, Alasdair Milne, lost his job when the BBC had to apologise for calling two Tory MPs, Gerald Howarth and Neil Hamilton, extreme Right-wing Nazi admirers. They each received an apology and £20,000 each, plus their legal costs. Milne was forced to resign. He remains one of the few DGs not to have been awarded a knighthood or peerage. Current DG Lord Hall, pictured, a BBC retiree rehired hastily to steady the ship after the Jimmy Savile sex scandal, already has a peerage, so he has less to lose if he carries the can for the Cliff debacle.
MIGHT Theresa May invite over France’s President Emmanuel Macron, 39, for a state visit? A diplomatic source says: ‘It’s likely. Her Government could do with a shot of successful Macron’s miraculous electoral elixir. And we’d all get the chance to inspect more closely his lovely wife of 64, Brigitte.’
SIR Vince Cable, 74, newly returned to the Commons, considers the prospect of becoming Lib Dem leader now that Tim Farron has gone. Is time on his side? Critics of ex-leader Menzies Campbell, chosen when he was 64, said the party needed a younger man. Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn is 68, but the old goat defies all laws of political gravity.
THE annual drinks reception for MPs hosted by the Scottish Office at London’s Dover House is a convivial affair, with Scottish Secretary David Mundell playing mine host. But only two Nationalist MPs turned up at Wednesday’s bash, in contrast to the SNP throng who attended in previous years. Surely they are out straining every sinew to improve Scotland’s lot, not sitting at home in a huff?