Hardcastle
HAVING already approved the menu for President Trump’s State banquet next week, will the Queen make a sublime political point as she did when feeding Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1978? According to Robert Hardman’s Queen of the World, the monarch, aware of loathsome Ceausescu’s persecution of his Hungarian minority, deliberately called the fish course ‘paupiettes de sole Claudine’ after her Hungarian great-great grandmother, Countess Claudine Rhedey. The translator remains unclear if the doomed dictator summoned cheeps and vinegar.
FAST-FOOD aficionado Trump was presented with a beloved hamburger by his Japanese hosts but the Queen’s feast will be a bap-free zone. The shortest odds, menu wise, is on fillet of Balmoral beef preceded by Scottish smoked salmon (his mother was from the Outer Hebrides) and strawberries and ice cream for dessert. And 2/1 on Scottish shortbread with the pud.
PEERING nostalgically around the men’s lavatory at nightclub Tramp during the 50th anniversary knees-up last week gnarled rocker Rod Stewart wondered, tapping the side of his nose, what had happened to the original cubicles, musing: ‘I spent a lot of time in there. Yeah, and a load of money!’ What can you mean, Rod?
A CHARITY lunch with Vogue diva Anna Wintour, pictured, has attracted only £6,000 of the anticipated £15,000. Could the paucity of bids be down to stick thin Anna’s normal luncheon fare of a hamburger without the bun – which would make £6,000 look extremely generous?
SHOULD Theresa May, with more time on her hands, start scribbling her memoirs she could be in for a financial disappointment. While Tony Blair got a reported £4.6million for his book and David Cameron trousered £800,000, publishing sources say that Theresa’s confession would be lucky to fetch £150,000. My abacus advises that this is less than 1 per cent of the £50million paid for Michelle and Barack Obama’s jottings.
PRINCESS Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, prances about stately homes filming clips of himself for a possible TV series called Burrell’s Britain. No sign of a close-up outside his flower shop and flat in Cheshire, where he’s dropped the sale price from £600,000 to £550,000 in the hope of luring a buyer.
ITV viewers missed Mrs May’s tearful resignation from Downing Street as the broadcaster, unlike the BBC, stuck to its normal schedule. It should have shown Jeremy Kyle’s bearpit, now cancelled. Instead, ITV’s audience was treated to a repeat of Dickinson’s Real Deal. Historic!
THERESA May impersonator Jan Ravens tells Radio Times she’ll miss the PM because ‘she’s such an icon of incompetence and dysfunction’. Is Jan so ungracious because she is out of a job?