Ephraim Hardcastle
WHILE more than a dozen bishops publicly lambasted Boris over the Dominic Cummings affair, they represent just over 10 per cent of the Church of England’s 112 bishops – twice as many as 100 years ago. Incoming Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell is tasked with drastically reducing the number. One of the agitators, Bishop of Worcester John Inge, was appointed by the Queen and is Lord High Almoner. Was he obliged to consult HM before describing Boris’s defence of Cummings as ‘risible’?
MARY Wakefield recalls falling for Dominic Cummings after he was hired to liven up The Spectator’s website, attracting death threats by publishing insulting cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. ‘All of us at the magazine’s office were furious, thinking this lunatic was trying to get us blown up by Islamists,’ says Mrs Cummings. ‘So I’ve ended up married to a man who I once thought was trying to get me killed. Very strange.’ Mills and Boon it ain’t.
AS a patron of the National Portrait Gallery, was the Duchess of Cambridge consulted before Boris appointed Chris ‘Failing’ Grayling a trustee of the gallery? Not highly regarded in Cabinet Tory grandee Ken Clarke once described turning up at a brewery tour organised by Grayling, tweeting: ‘Unfortunately there isn’t any beer so he’s had to cancel it.’
TODAY presenter Mishal Husain, pictured, highlighting research on mothers doing most of the housework in lockdown, berates her three sons on air for not helping with domestic chores. ‘I may be unburdening myself here,’ she says. ‘I think I just shouldn’t be in a position to have to ask. I’ve publicly shamed all the members of my household now.’
MICHAEL Cole, former director of Mohamed Al Fayed’s Fulham FC, has an atmosphere-adding solution to behindclosed-doors football, suggesting: ‘The Premier League should hire the man who bellowed about Brexit for months on end outside the Houses of Parliament as a peripatetic one-man crowd, attending as many featured games as possible.’
PRIVATE Eye’s ex-editor Richard Ingrams, whose spoof John Betjeman poem on Anthony Blunt fooled US professor Kevin Gardner, tells The Oldie he wishes his parody on the Snowdon divorce had also been included in Gardner’s collection of Betjeman’s work: ‘Gosh, oh dear! What jolly bad luck!/ Poor old Tony, and Margaret too/ Their nuptial business comes unstuck/ It seems the “arrangement” has fallen through.’ More EJ Thribb than Betjeman?
ANDREW Marr, fronting his new Channel 5 show The World’s Greatest Paintings, manages to wangle a private viewing of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, gushing: ‘Here we are at last, just the two of us – Andrew and Mona.’ Fancy!