Hardcastle Ephraim
Since Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer appears to be shy about using his knighthood, hansard has stopped using it. The official parliamentary record of the Afghanistan debate fails to give him his K. Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay hoyle has also stopped addressing him as ‘Sir Keir’. Why doesn’t Starmer hand it back to the Queen if he’s embarrassed about using it?
WHY have MPs deferred for two years another vote on the much-needed refurbishment of the crumbling Palace of Westminster? The estimated cost, which has ballooned from £4billion to £20billion, is one factor. But I hear the real reason is that the project will take years and the palace is required at some point to provide the backdrop for a state funeral followed by a coronation. ‘For Parliament to be encased in scaffolding and Parliament Square used as a lorry park for construction vehicles would be unacceptable,’ says my source.
STILL going strong – Petula Clark, 88, and Julie Andrews, 85. Miss Clark recalls: ‘I know Julie Andrews as we were child prodigies. We did lots of shows for the forces during the Second World War and we travelled on troop trains. We travelled on the luggage racks and we were very thin. We would get off the train in the dark and go to a camp and we would sing, but not together. She was with her parents and I was with my father. We were not rivals but I think our parents were.’ Curiously, Julie’s a dame but Petula isn’t. Why so?
JOE Biden, 78, conquered his teenage stuttering, we are told, by reciting Irish poet WB Yeats’s famous 1920 poem The Second Coming, which begins: ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/ Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’ Washington columnist Maureen Dowd, pictured, points out that the lines ‘eerily sprang to life in the President’s helter-skelter exit from Afghanistan, a land that still prizes falconry and falcons flying in widening gyres’.
SIR Ian McKellen, playing the Prince of Denmark in an ‘age-blind’ production of hamlet, has been talking favourably about his ‘friend’ the gay activist Peter Tatchell, who is the subject of an admiring new documentary film. As a founder of the gay campaigning group Stonewall, McKellen says: ‘Although he thought we were rather sedate and perhaps not aggressive enough, Peter is now absolutely reconciled with Stonewall.’ The non-sedate Tatchell once pushed aside the then Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey while he was preaching an easter sermon and lectured the congregation about gay concerns.
SARAH Ferguson, 61, who prefers to be known as Sarah, Duchess of York, says her first adult novel, Her Heart for a Compass, was inspired by a great-great aunt, Lady Margaret Montagu Douglas Scott, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch. ‘She’s a redhead, she’s strongwilled and stands up for what she believes in,’ says Fergie. Are the Buccleuchs tickled? The country’s biggest landowners, ‘they have finer furniture than the Queen’, according to a friend.