Ephraim Hardcastle
PRINCESS Diana’s exbutler Paul Burrell, 59, currently appearing in Australia’s version of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, says of Princes William and Harry: ‘It’s been impossible for the boys to see me but I knew their mother better than anyone else on the planet. As the boys get older… I have no doubt they will reach out to me.’ In 2003, after he’d written a book about Diana – having said he’d never do that – the princes issued a joint statement saying: ‘We cannot believe that Paul, who was entrusted with so much, could abuse his position with such a cold and overt betrayal.’
PRINCE Harry and Meghan Markle are likely to follow the example of William and Kate by requesting donations to their favourite charities instead of wedding gifts. In 2011, they raised more than £1million for 26 charities including London Zoo, the Army Widows’ Association and Australia’s Flying Doctor Service. When the then Princess Elizabeth married in 1947 she received 131 pairs of nylon stockings, cases of tinned pineapples, a sewing machine, a bath sponge, and a lace tray cover from Mahatma Ghandi, woven by himself and mistaken by her horrified grandmother, Queen Mary, for a loincloth.
SITTING next to the Queen at London Fashion Week, frocks bigwig Dame Anna Wintour, 68, pictured, wore her trademark sunglasses. Curiously she didn’t wear them when the Queen presented her with her damehood last year. Wearing shades, the dame has explained, means ‘I can sit in a show and if I am bored out of my mind nobody will notice’.
THE Queen invited US evangelist Billy Graham, who has died aged 99, to preach to her family at Windsor and Sandringham. ‘She has gone out of her way to be quietly supportive of our mission,’ he said, adding: ‘When visiting the royal family at Sandringham in 1984 (my wife) Ruth and I walked past a woman wearing an old raincoat, Wellingtons and a scarf. She was bent over fixing some food for the dogs. We thought she was one of the housekeepers, but when she straightened up, we saw it was the Queen!’
REV Graham latterly enjoyed round-theclock nursing care at his North Carolina home from two nurses – ‘for accountability purposes’, said his preacher grandson Will, 42. He explained that when Rev Graham began his ministry in 1948, Americans were still influenced by Sinclair Lewis’s brilliant 1927 novel Elmer Gantry – about a drunken, womanising tent preacher. It was feared a naked woman might sneak into Rev Graham’s room ‘and she’d jump into his arms, they’d take a picture and frame my granddaddy’, added Will.
HOLLYWOOD star Jennifer Lawrence, 27, who announces she’s quitting acting for a year to focus on political activism, says her ambition is to ‘throw a martini in the face’ of President Donald Trump. His son Donald Trump Jnr warns: ‘I’m pretty sure that’s not how it would end.’ Meaning she could be shot by the Secret Service?