Ephraim Hardcastle
VACATED by the Gloucesters and rejected by Harry and Meghan, Apartment 1 at Kensington Palace remains vacant. With no royal tenant likely to take up residence in the foreseeable future, might Charles consider converting the empty 21-room space into smaller flats for rent? Doing so would advance the Prince’s Foundation’s aspiration to help with the housing crisis. The foundation, Charles’s community support unit, has already outlined his plans for ‘rediscovering’ the Edwardian mansion block to provide accommodation. St James’s Palace already has apartments to rent. Why not Kensington Palace?
THE genial countenance of 6ft 7in tall BBC health editor Hugh Pym looms over a woman travelling on London Underground asking why she wasn’t wearing a face mask. Was this a novel anti-Covid enforcement policy by doom and gloom BBC News? Wonders Marlborough-educated Hugh: ‘Is it being public spirited to politely ask why someone is not wearing a mask on the tube or is it an intrusion on their privacy?’
POISED to return to his beloved New York Jets at the end of his term as Trump’s UK ambassador, Woody Johnson is yet to learn who incoming President Biden will send to the Court of St James’s. Any envoy would be an improvement on Warren Harding’s 1921 appointee George Harvey. He dressed in satin knee breeches and silver buckled slippers and once gave a speech to a London club questioning whether women had souls.
QUALIFIED to extinguish 86 birthday candles last week, Dame Judi Dench, pictured, vows to persist in defying her age. ‘I don’t want to be told I can’t do something, that’s my maxim!’ she says. ‘I’ll just have a go. I may make a terrible mess of it but I’d sooner that than not have a go at all.’ Does Strictly beckon, Judi?
IRISH-born Jamie Dornan defends the widely mocked accents that he and Emily Blunt employ in their new movie Wild Mountain Thyme: ‘We’re not making this movie for Irish people. It’s a film that we want to be seen all over the world, so we have to find something that works and we sounded exactly like they were trying to sound.’ Keep digging, Jamie!
JOHN le Carré’s death leaves Len Deighton as the sole major Cold War novelist alive. Now 91, Deighton’s most famous book, The Ipcress File, is to be made into an ITV series – 55 years after the film version with Michael Caine. Peaky Blinders star Joe Cole plays Harry Palmer.
ARTIST Maggi Hambling has found comfort with rescue pug Peggy after the death of Lux, her Tibetan terrier. ‘After a suitable period of mourning,’ she says, ‘I went to Lux’s grave and asked her permission to get another dog. She said I could.’ Might she not have consulted Lux about her metal skyrocket-like statue to Mary Wollstonecraft in Islington, likened by some to a dog’s dinner?