Ephraim Hardcastle
PRINCE Charles has put a copy of The Highgrove Florilegium in the Royal Collection Shop, where you can buy it for just £12,950. Limited to 175 copies, the two-volume literary work, for which he has written an introduction, features detailed illustrations of plants and trees at Highgrove, created by botanical artists who spent seven years traipsing around the gardens. The text is by Christopher Humphries and Frederick J. Rumsey, the preface is signed by Charles and all royalties go to his Charities Foundation. Isn’t life grand?
PRINCESSES Beatrice and Eugenie invited Vogue to Royal Lodge at Windsor. However, only US pop queen Rihanna made it on to the magazine’s cover. How disappointing for the princesses. Especially since Princess Diana got the cover on five occasions and Kate landed one too. Was this Vogue stunt imagined by the script writers of Channel 4’s disrespectful comedy series The Windsors, in which the royal sisters are played by actresses Ellie White and Celeste Dring, both 27, pictured?
WEASELLY Remainer Robert Peston, 58, ITV’s political editor, tweets: ‘We’ve got an official opposition tearing itself apart over anti-Semitism, the founder of the English Defence League running rings around the judiciary and a government negotiating a Brexit plan that its own MPs and ministers tell me is dead. When will we pull ourselves together, as a nation?’ Calm down, dear, aren’t you enjoying every moment of it?
HOME Secretary Sajid Javid advertises for a Head of EU Exit Communications on LinkedIn, offering £75,000 to £85,000 for ‘an empowering leader’. Good luck to the successful applicant. The so-called negotiations have thus far been proved fruitless. Some now suspect they were never intended to succeed in the first place.
MARGARET Thatcher’s biographer, Charles Moore, deplores the 80thanniversary edition of The Beano edited by so-called comedian David Walliams, in particular a boast by the teacher of the Bash Street Kids that they played God Save The Queen by farting into musical instruments. Moore points out: ‘If the authority figure becomes subversive, all dramatic tension evaporates.’ So true!
FORMER Lib Dem leader and ex-Royal Marine Lord Ashdown, 77, muses on Radio 4: ‘I trained as a commando officer. I know of no other way of dealing with a problem than fixed bayonets and charging at it.’ So why on earth did gung-ho Paddy join the wringing-wet Lib Dems?
ITV’s adaptation of 19th-century satirist William Thackeray’s story Vanity Fair features Madonna’s Material Girl ditty and a re-worked version of Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower in the soundtrack. Executive producer Damien Timmer says: ‘It has to be accessible and entertaining and have integrity for Thackeray fans, and it has to honour him in a wonderful, sheeny, shiny, 21st-century way.’ Dumbed down, in other words.