Ephraim Hardcastle
GRATIFIED that the Queen has, for now, replaced Andrew as Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, some senior officers still hope it will pass to the Duchess of Cambridge. Conscious of the paucity of Kate’s service roles, Prince Philip had once been keen for her to replace him. He apparently thought that installing Kate would bring the guards full circle as in 1942, aged 16, Princess Elizabeth took on the Grenadiers at the request of her father. In 2015, Philip persuaded Kate to become the RAF cadets’ honorary air commodore-in-chief, her only service role. Perhaps Kate might help the Queen with her current headache – finding replacements for Andrew with his other regiments.
BEFORE his elevation to BBC Flavour of the Season status, Amol Rajan accused a Tory backbencher who failed to declare a £40,000 fee from I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! of bringing ‘ineradicable shame and injury’ on herself, adding: ‘I hope her constituents follow the viewers of ITV by… laughing in her face and then sacking her at the earliest possible opportunity.’ Unfortunate that Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries has now donned her butcher’s apron to fillet the BBC.
DOWNING Street party sleuth Sue Gray might find dealing with Boris a doddle after her dexterous handling of Peter Mandelson. He had a hissy fit asking for a grander job description in the Brown government in 2009 when Harriet Harman vetoed his Deputy Prime Minister title. Mandy said the title he ‘really wanted’ was Lord President of the Council, once held by his grandfather – ‘Suburban Stalin’ Herbert Morrison. Gray, as guardian of propriety issues in the Cabinet Office, duly obliged.
EMILY Maitlis’s notorious Newsnight attack on Dominic Cummings over his Barnard Castle lockdown infringement prompts writer Charles Moore to urge her to praise him now as a ‘brave whistleblower’ and chief witness for Boris’s prosecution. Alas, Emily, pictured, can’t oblige. She is off screen for the immediate future, working on a tenpart BBC documentary on US politics.
PLAYING Cyrano de Bergerac as a lovelorn dwarf in a new movie, Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage tells the New York Times that his covert courting of Roxane is ‘putting up a profile of yourself out there that is not necessarily true to who you are,’ adding: ‘We all pretend to be other people to varying degrees.’ Asks the NYT: ‘Did Cyrano invent catfishing?’ Discuss.
WHY did Elvis Costello change his mind after initially rejecting an OBE in 2019? His mother reminded him that his late father – jazz trumpeter Ross – had played with the Joe Loss Orchestra at the Buckingham Palace Christmas Ball in 1962. ‘You can bet your life my dad went in the tradesman’s entrance because they were the help,’ says Elvis, real name Declan McManus. ‘And you know what, I went in the front.’