Ephraim Hardcastle
MOANING about the poor financial performance of The Who’s comeback studio album in 2019 – their first in 13 years – frontman Roger Daltrey, whose fortune is estimated at £59million, is unimpressed to hear that surviving bandmate Pete Townshend has been working on a new one. He complains in a Q&A: ‘The last album cost me money to make! I can’t go on paying for music, that’s a fool’s game.’ Poor wee soul!
FLORA Gill, 29, pictured, journalist daughter of ex-Home Secretary Amber Rudd and late writer AA Gill, has clearly inherited her parents’ love of public exposure, tweeting: ‘Anyone else having to lie and say their camera’s broken on Zoom calls, when in reality they’re just working naked?’
COURTIERS’ noses are out of joint over being blamed for flouncing-off Harry and Meghan, now reported to have bought a house in Santa Barbara. ‘The ultimate faux pas came when Meghan upbraided one of the Queen’s flunkeys in front of HM,’ says a source, adding: ‘Never tell off other people’s servants.’ Will Santa Barbara suit the Sussexes? ‘It’s where retired people go to be close to their parents’, says a local source.
GUY Masterson, 59, distinguished for his solo theatre performances of Under Milk Wood, Animal Farm and Shylock, makes a startling claim: ‘I have it on good authority that at a Zoom meeting from No10 about the future of the arts, [the PM’s advisor Dominic] Cummings told [film and theatre director Sir] Sam Mendes that “the ******* ballerinas can get to the back of the queue”.’ Surely not!
THE recently-deceased Tory MP Sir Peter Viggers appears in a Channel 5 documentary, Diana: Queen Of Hearts, criticising the princess’s anti-landmine campaign. ‘I would compare her actions with that of Brigitte Bardot in support of cats,’ says Sir Peter, who died aged 82 in March. Surely Diana will be remembered more fondly for her anti-landmine campaign than Sir Peter will for claiming a duck house on his parliamentary expenses.
THEATRE luminary Steven Berkoff, 83, says PM Boris Johnson looks like a polar bear but has done nothing to protect such beasts, adding on Paul McKenna’s Positivity Podcast: ‘Of course he has an enlightened girlfriend. Beautiful, I must add, and she has persuaded him he must bring in a law which must forbid trophy hunting which should have been done centuries ago. Where is that law? Why can’t we stop it? I saw a picture of a man killing a bear and I wept for the bear. I had to write a poem about it. It is a beastly world we are living in.’
FIRST Minister of Wales, Labour’s Mark Drakeford, whose TV performances have been an energy-draining feature of the Covid crisis, boasted that he was ‘selfisolating in a miniature hut’ to protect his wife during the Covid plague. The ‘hut’ turns out to be a two-storey stable conversion in their garden, fitted out with all the mod cons.