Ephraim Hardcastle
FOLLOWING Justin Welby’s arrival at Cop26, Radio 4’s Mishal Husain tactlessly reminds him of his less-than-green credentials as an oil executive in the 1980s. Did he regret that period in his life, she inquired silkily. The Archbishop of Canterbury, 65, replied: ‘Well, sadly, it wasn’t known… it wasn’t as clearly known... I don’t remember discussing climate change.’ He bumbled on: ‘The vast majority of people in the oil industry are people. They’re people and they look at their children, their grandchildren... they’re pretty passionate about change.’ Shouldn’t he have guessed an 11-year career in oil, at Elf, Paris, and Enterprise Oil, London, might have come up – and devised a better reply?
NOW described as ‘a broadcaster, writer and economist’, ex-shadow chancellor Ed Balls, 54, appears in a two-part BBC2 documentary about elderly care, as mentioned in Saturday’s Mail. ‘Don’t go near my gums!’ he pleads before having his teeth brushed. He’s dangled from a hoist when being transferred from bed to chair and spoon-fed yoghurt. The former Strictly Come Dancing star, whose mother Carolyn is in a Norwich care home, is introduced as: ‘This is Ed – he used to be a politician.’ To which a resident responds: ‘Oh dear!’ But doesn’t his post-parliamentary career seem more fragrant than the wallet-stuffing commercial activities of his former adversaries David Cameron and George Osborne?
THE title of Dame Eileen Atkins’s memoir, Will She Do? Act One Of A Life On Stage, is explained by her childhood. Born in a Salvation Army hostel in north London, the daughter of a gas meter reader and a seamstress, Dame Eileen, pictured, says: ‘You feel as if you won’t do. That’s how I still feel.’ You’d never guess it watching her as Doc Martin’s bossy Aunt Ruth in the long-running ITV show about a socially awkward GP in Cornwall played by Martin Clunes.
HOW does anyone write a second novel? Amanda Craig responds to this online query: ‘Sheer bloodymindedness. I speak as one who had her first novel almost completely panned and who has never been short-listed for any prize (despite being compared to Austen, Dickens, Trollope etc).’ Ms Craig’s latest, The Golden Rule, was long-listed for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. It’s about two women plotting to murder each other’s husbands, and she says she knew how to hire a contract killer. During a row with an ex-lover, literary critic David Sexton, she says she was told by her builder: ‘If you want him offed, Amanda, just say the word – I know someone who’ll do it’.
SkINNY Malinky-legged Jeremy Vine, recalls his time at Durham University: ‘Saying the cathedral is visible when you’re in the city is like saying Mick Jagger is visible when you watch the Rolling Stones. There’s barely a moment where you’re not conscious of the greatest arrangement of quarried rock on the face of the Earth. The same for the cathedral.’ ‘SO RUDE when people don’t tell you they can’t make your Halloween party, especially when you go to the effort of getting them their own hat’ – a harrowing tweet from Countdown’s Rachel Riley.