Hardcastle Ephraim
THE departure of Boris Johnson’s girlfriend Carrie Symonds from her VIP balcony overlooking the Cenotaph during Sunday’s two-minute silence and then again during the wreathlaying intrigued veterans attending the ceremony. When was the last time, they wondered, that a member of the Royal Family, including the late Queen Mother, had felt the need to temporarily abandon the commemoration? The answer? Never.
PRINCE Andrew’s front-row seat at the Festival of Remembrance wasn’t a case of the Queen showing motherly solidarity amid the Epstein scandal but strictly following royal protocol. As the senior royal on duty without a partner present, other than the Queen, he balanced the man-woman-man-woman seating plan approved by HM.
PETE Townshend has abandoned Labour in general and Jeremy Corbyn in particular, saying: ‘So what should I vote? I would usually be a socialist voter. But if I vote Jeremy Corbyn and he comes after me, I’m back in 1973 with no f ****** money at all.’ Sounds like a suitable ditty for the new Who album.
EMMA Watson, pictured, says she can find kissing ‘awkward’, telling Vogue: ‘I’ll be making out with someone and then I am on the telly behind us and all I can hear is the Harry Potter theme tune as I’m kissing someone and I’m like, “Do I turn it off? Do I just ignore this? Is it just me thinking about this?”.’
THERE has been a blip in Rupert Murdoch’s wooing of China with his refusal to remove a reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from a book commemorating this month’s 50th birthday of the tabloid Sun. The manuscript was sent to China for printing and when Bejing’s demands for censorship were refused, the lavish coffee table tome was produced elsewhere.
WASTING no time cashing in after being signed up for the after-dinner speaking circuit by London agency JLA, former Commons Speaker John Bercow competes against William Hague, the company’s current star political speaker. The former foreign secretary is ranked as a prestigious ‘AA’ speaker, and his services are available for ‘over £25,000’ a time. The rivalry is spiced up by Bercow and Hague’s mutual loathing.
NOTING that climate-change activist Greta Thunberg is being honoured with a giant mural in San Francisco, Piers Morgan suggests the artist’s effort has produced an unfortunate likeness, cheekily tweeting, ‘Why are they turning her into Vladimir Putin?’
EMMA Thompson is ‘vile to work with, demanding, quite unpleasant and passive-aggressive’. Says who? Why, Dame Emma herself. She’ll say anything, apparently, to promote her starring and writing roles in the new film Last Christmas.