Ephraim Hardcastle
BLUSTERING Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson – in the Caribbean reviewing our hurricane relief efforts – is caught out embarrassingly by Alex Thomson of Channel 4 News. He told the TV man on camera: ‘That very plane I’ve just arrived on is laden with aid!’ Thomson afterwards told viewers: ‘That plane was not laden with food or water aid – we checked. The rations and water on it were for military personnel.’
THE film Victoria and Abdul, which opens today starring Dame Judi Dench in the title role, portrays the monarch’s doctor James Reid as a racist who, when he is asked to examine Victoria’s Indian servant Abdul for venereal disease, said: ‘I didn’t spent seven years at Edinburgh [University] to examine Indian d***s.’ His grandson, Private Eye founder Richard Ingrams, says: ‘My grandfather would never have said that. He was a proper Scottish doctor not a racist.’ I am sure he’s right. Was the term d*** in use then?
THE appearance of Jane Austen on the new £10 note will please the Duchess of Cornwall. Camilla named Elizabeth Bennet, the star of Pride and Prejudice, as her literary heroine in a 2015 interview. Given that she and Elizabeth were pursued by wealthy, narcissistic men from grand families dwelling in large estates, but content to marry beneath their stations, it seems an apposite choice.
APROPOS Ms Austen, there’s a closer royal connection – the Duchess of Cambridge is an 11th cousin through Henry Percy, 2nd Earl of Northumberland. Kate’s another commoner-turned-royal who snared her own Mr Darcy, albeit one with less hair than the fictional one is said to possess. No doubt both duchesses were guided by Ms Austen’s immortal advice: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ Or an already married one in the case of Charles.
KIRSTIE Allsopp, 46, pictured, says in an interview that there have been no sexual shenanigans between her and fellow Location, Location, Location presenter Phil Spencer but adds: ‘Once, we were sitting at the airport in the Maldives. This British couple walked past, and she turned to him and said in a loud stage whisper, “I told you!”’
JACOB Rees-Mogg MP, in conversation with LBC’s Nick Ferrari, referring to his former parliamentary colleague George Osborne’s attacks on the PM, says: ‘I think this type of bitterness and bile ends up making the person who has that bitterness and bile feel resentful and sad and has no effect on broader politics. His firepower diminishes with every bitter outburst and for so able a man that is something we should be sad about rather than particularly condemn.’ Wise words, but will on-the-rampage George heed them?
DISMISSING ‘contemporary comedy’, raging-at-the-dying-of-the-light comic John Cleese announces: ‘I don’t watch any. I’m 77. I will almost certainly be dead within ten years – maybe I’ll get 15. So to sit down to watch a sitcom seems to be a rather futile way of passing the time.’ However he has accepted a BBC sitcom offer, despite vowing never to work for them again.