Ephraim Hardcastle
PRINCE Charles departs for a difficult visit to Australia next week to open the Commonwealth Games on behalf of the Queen. He’s on the back foot there popularity-wise with local polling revealing 52 per cent support for a republic. If there has to be a successor to the Queen, only 37 per cent want him. Prince William doesn’t do much better at 41 per cent. Republicans there have come up with an unlikely-to-be-accepted ruse to placate older Aussies embarrassed about abolishing the monarchy. Invite the Queen, 91, to be their first president.
APROPOS of Charles, his consort Camilla will spend only two days in Brisbane, arriving next Wednesday and leaving on Friday. Are two days sufficient to persuade locals she – and Charles – will spend longer there if he becomes their head of state in succession to his mother?
TALENTED singer, TV presenter and model Myleene Klass, 39, pictured – the Gorleston, Norfolk-born daughter of an Austrian father and Filipino mother – is concerned that she comes across as a man-pleasing bimbo. She says in an interview: ‘I can play a piano concerto, care for my [two] daughters [Ava, ten; Hero, seven], do a four-hour radio show and box. To reduce me to titillating men is a misunderstanding.’ Indeed it is!
WHO will supply the Queen’s Easter egg at Windsor? Five chocolatiers hold HM’s warrant, including Prestat, a company famous for having inspired Roald Dahl to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But our monarch is a fan of a humbler confection – the Malteser, by Mars. ‘She discovered this spherical treat, first sold in 1937, as a teenager,’ I am advised.
LABOUR ex-lecturer Bruce Grocott, 78, aka life peer Baron Grocott of Telford, is pushing a bill through the Lords to get rid of the 92 mainly Tory hereditary peers Tony Blair left behind after his tinkering, 1999 Upper House ‘reforms’. When one of their number dies, the group elects a successor – a system class warrior Grocott seeks to abolish so that hereditary peers literally die out. Oddly, he’s backed by a majority of life peers, mostly appointed, not elected. The final abolition of hereditary peers removes the last connection between birth and legislative power other than the monarchy itself – a fact that won’t have gone unnoticed in Buckingham Palace.
JEREMY Corbyn’s anti-Semitism problems are a challenge for his shadow cabinet colleague Shami Chakrabarti, 48, the former human rights campaigner of Bengali descent, created a life peeress after her 2016 report on the issue for Labour was dismissed as ‘a whitewash’. Pointedly ex-Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband mentions it when calling for the party ‘to haul ourselves out of the depths’.
SKITTISH, Sydney-born, UK-based novelist Kathy Lette, 59, advises re the Aussie cricket team’s ball-tampering scandal: ‘I hasten to remind you, we are convict stock.’