Ephraim Hardcastle
HARRY and Meghan’s erroneous description of a secret backyard wedding might stem from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s advice that flowery personal vows could not be exchanged at their Windsor wedding. American couples often write sentimental speeches to each other and Meghan and Harry seem to have followed the practice, exchanging them at the private prayer ceremony with Justin Welby. Meghan did refer in the Oprah interview to vows ‘framed in our home’. Might she have transcribed them using the copperplate handwriting she learnt as a calligrapher to earn cash pre-Suits?
TEN years after the Queen astonished Irish President Mary McAleese by greeting her in perfectly accented Gaelic during her historic visit to Dublin, she sent her successor Michael D Higgins a St Patrick’s Day message yesterday in his native language. She wrote: ‘Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh go léir.’ (Happy St Patrick’s Day to you all.)
GRACE Kelly’s inability to resist the temptation to have affairs with her Hollywood co-stars including Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby and William Holden, is only partially explained in a Channel 5 documentary on Saturday. Making Mogambo in Africa in 1953, Grace, pictured in her prime, quipped: ‘What else is there to do if you are in a tent in Africa alone with Clark Gable?’
ACCORDING to cartoonist Peter Brookes, Boris has a bare island amid his ocean of hair. Is the PM going bald? Brookes’s art dealer Chris Beetles, a retired GP, thinks he is suffering from telogen effluvium. ‘This is a condition which causes hair loss after an illness, major trauma or even childbirth,’ says Beetles. The PM has had Covid and a new baby. Is Carrie’s lavish flat refurb the trauma?
WHAT would Rumpole creator John Mortimer make of daughter Emily being accused of plagiarism? Actress Emily has been left red-faced after reports she lifted some words from a 2018 Atlantic article by Caitlin Flanagan in her recent New York Times essay on author Vladimir Nabokov. It has now been revised to acknowledge Flanagan’s previously uncredited input. Talented Emily has been scribbling a BBC-commissioned screen adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. Nancy won’t complain. She died in 1973.
IS Comic Relief stalwart Emma Freud finally hanging up her scarlet schnozzle after this weekend’s 18th biannual Red Nose event? ‘I would quite like to stop on Saturday,’ she says. ‘I am a bit tired and I want to get on with encouraging my children to leave home.’ What of her partner, Comic Relief co-founder Richard Curtis? ‘He is way too old to be doing what he is doing’, adds Emma. ‘He has got totally grey hair and it is time for us to move on, but knowing him that is not going to happen very soon.’
NO complaint yet from Charles Spencer after historian Piers Brendon’s Channel 5 description of his dad, Johnny, the eighth Earl Spencer. ‘He was about as dim as an aristocrat can possibly be’, remarked Brendon. ‘His commanding officer in the Army said: “If you set his trousers on fire it would take him ten minutes to realise that his bottom was burning”.’