Ephraim Hardcastle
PRINCESS Beatrice’s wedding next year creates an accommodation headache for Prince Charles, de facto landlord of Kensington Palace. Sister Eugenie was surprisingly billeted there after her wedding so Beatrice might expect similar treatment. There is no shortage of empty rooms. Harry and Meghan’s two-bed Nottingham Cottage is available as well as Apartment One, next door to William and Kate, refurbished for the Sussexes before they decamped to Windsor. One snag, alas: Grace-and-favour peppercorn rents are no more. Beatrice should expect to pay £3,500 per month for Nottingham Cottage and £18,500 for Apartment One.
LAMENTING the lack of proper curtseys, royal commentator Alastair Bruce believes a bob of the knees doesn’t cut the mustard. He must be horrified at what goes on at Buck House these days. Gentlemen ushers lining up guests at receptions apologetically quote former senior courtier Admiral Colin Cooke-Priest, saying: ‘The merest jiggle of the knees will do.’
IS Harriet Harman, pictured, feverishly lobbying to replace Squeaker John Bercow, too posh for the job? Daughter of a Harley Street doctor, cousin of Lady Antonia Fraser and an old Paulina from elitist St Paul’s, she’d be one of the few Speakers in recent memory to have a private education since Selwyn Lloyd. Successors include miner’s son George Thomas, Tiller Girl Betty Boothroyd and sheet metal worker Michael Martin. And despite his regal air Bercow’s dad Charlie was a taxi driver.
SIR Nicholas Soames takes the moral high ground over Commons insults, telling BBC Radio 4: ‘I was frankly absolutely appalled by the whole language and tone of the House.’ But didn’t Sir Nicholas describe Tory colleague Adam Afriyie as a ‘chateau-bottled, nuclear-powered s***’, and instructed party chairman James Cleverly: “F*** off, you c***?’
CORBYNISTA Paul Mason is invited back on to his old programme, BBC’s Newsnight, to attack Boris’s choice of words. ‘It’s the language of incitement,’ he drones gravely. Surely not the same Mason who, as well as calling the PM a pro-fascist ‘dictator’, recently described Brexiteers as ‘a tawdry alliance of billionaires and racist pensioners’?
WHEN Nationalist MPs started clapping in the Commons in May 2015, John Bercow insisted: ‘The convention we don’t clap in this chamber is very long-established and widely respected’. Now he’s decreed that applause is permitted. Why the U-turn? No coincidence that the Squeaker eagerly enjoyed applause for himself.
LORD Sugar’s Apprentice wannabes won’t be bothering John Humphrys on Mastermind according to Sugar’s sidekick Claude Littner, newly returned from filming: ‘I had to take the group to a wine cellar. But they couldn’t find it. It didn’t dawn on the candidates that a wine cellar was downstairs!’