Ephraim Hardcastle
JETTISONING Andrew as patron will pose replacement problems for some charities. These days younger Royals favour more direct involvement with a smaller number of organisations, which is different from the Queen Mother’s day. On her death in 2002 a list of patronages was put on a card table at Sandringham as Royals, in order of seniority, chose which they wanted. Only a few charities were ignored.
CLEARLY no love was lost between David Frost and Jonathan Miller, who has died aged 85. the polymath disputed Frost’s contribution to the sixties’ satire boom, saying: ‘Frost simply stole most of the ideas. He was a man with grotesque ambitions – to the extent that when he died he managed to have a commemorative service at Westminster Abbey!’ Fingers crossed they’ll book the Abbey for you, Jonathan.
EVERGREEN Edna O’Brien, 88, winner of the £40,000 David Cohen Prize for Literature, surely chuckles at the remark by previous winner, 82-year-old youngster Tom Stoppard. ‘Winning a lifetime achievement award, one’s first thought is: ‘‘Surely not yet”.’
STROUD tory candidate siobhan Baillie, pictured, says she was ‘semi-feral’ when she left her ‘chaotic’ Yorkshire home at 15 after her parents broke up, telling Mail Plus ‘Order Order’ she ‘pulled herself up by her bootstraps’ by working at safeway during schooldays spent flitting between the flats of friends. Easy-on-the eye siobhan, married and a successful solicitor, says she gets a warm welcome door-knocking in stroud: ‘I’m a novelty because they have never had a woman MP.’
HAS Johnny Depp developed an addiction to lawsuits? He’s sued his lawyer for £23 million, chased his new attorneys for £320,000 and pursued ex-wife Amber Heard for defamation. As Devil’s Dictionary author Ambrose Bierce observed: ‘Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.”
JACK Reacher creator Lee Child, 65, is applying for an Irish passport, declaring ‘I’m not a huge fan of Britain – it’s a silly and frustrating country’. Might Lee’s Hibernian leanings – he was born in Coventry to an Irish father – be prompted in part by his £40 million fortune and Dublin’s tax exemption for scribes.
Trudie Juggernauth, senior wifelet to the priapic (retd) Alexander, Marquess of Bath, 87, has been helping him in his latest venture at Longleat. ‘Alexander has developed an enthusiasm for wine making,’ she says. ‘The first vintage is nearly ready. Its called Wifelet.’
SHOULD Clive James, who has died aged 80, encounter Dame Barbara Cartland in heaven will she chide him for describing her eyes as twin miracles of mascara ‘looking like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.’ RIP.