Ephraim Hardcastle
CAMILLA delights Australian charity Givit with a Zoom call declaring: ‘I can’t wait for my next visit.’ They shouldn’t hold their breath. Loathing long-haul travel Camilla has made only three visits Down Under in 15 years. She flew back from the last, in 2018, after only 48 hours, leaving Charles to finish the tour solo. ‘I love the Australian humour,’ she adds. ‘We always have a good laugh.’ Let’s hope the duchess isn’t having a giraffe over future Oz trips.
ROMAN Catholic Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols may not thank Church of England primate Justin Welby for ordering a purge of slavery-linked memorials. For Cardinal John Henry Newman could be a target in any investigation of Catholic churchmen with links to slavery. Recently elevated to sainthood, Newman, a 19th century intellectual, pronounced in 1863 that slavery was ‘not a sin’, adding: ‘Comparative good may come out of sin [slavery] in this sinful world.’ A halo, unlike a statue, is impossible to topple.
KILLING Eve’s Jodie Comer was paid just £2,500 for appearing in the new BBC production of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. Other cast members including Imelda Staunton received the same. The BBC paid the monthly rate set by the Government’s furlough scheme, with cash saved going to the NHS. Jodie only spent a day filming at Elstree. My abacus calculates an eight-hour stint earned her about £300 an hour. Little compensation for learning one of Bennett’s dreary monologues.
THE Queen never met Boris’s new role model, FDR. Her mother, however, was served her first hot dog by the US President on a 1939 state visit to Washington She asked him how to eat it. Roosevelt explained: ‘Very simple. Push it into your mouth and keep pushing it until it is all gone.’
KATE Beckinsale’s moustached recreation, pictured, of cross-dressing Freddie Mercury won’t feature in Zanzibar’s new museum celebrating the life of its most famous son. With homosexuality illegal there, the museum has no mention of his gay past or his Aids-related death in 1991. Co-founder Javed Jafferji denies having sanitised Mercury’s life, saying: ‘What people do in their homes is a private thing.’
CHERIE Blair blames husband Tony’s inflated self-importance for his persistent failure to help with domestic chores, saying: ‘The problem has been since we left Downing Street he’s got into the habit of thinking that whatever he does is more important.’ Masters of the Universe don’t empty the dishwasher!
PESTERED by paparazzi in Hawaii, Piers Brosnan adapts his version of fellow Irishman Liam Neeson’s screen threat: ‘I will look for you. I will find you. And I will kill you.’ Brosnan’s version? ‘This is a tiny island and I know who they are and I know where they live, and we might just have to have words.’ Hardly James Bond, is it?