Ephraim Hardcastle
HARRY’S appearance at St Paul’s Invictus excitement on Wednesday was seen as a victory for Team Sussex with no other Royals present and an absence of London liverymen. This allowed Harry to wander around the congregation chatting and shaking hands – making the point that it was his service. The timing, clashing with the first garden party of the season, ensured the Royals would be busy. Of the nine active working royals, seven were at the garden party while the Duke of Kent went to Westminster Abbey for Stirling Moss’s memorial service. The ninth, Prince William, remained at Windsor.
JONATHAN Yeo, painting his soon to be unveiled portrait of the King, captures a ‘vigorous and commanding’ monarch, explaining: ‘You see physical changes in people, depending on how things are going.’ Yet Jonathan only learned of Charles’s cancer when he finished the canvas, adding: ‘Age and experience were suiting him. His demeanour definitely changed after he became King.’
TOBIAS Menzies, The Crown’s Prince Philip, defends screenwriter Peter Morgan’s stretching of the truth in the Netflix production. ‘Peter was seeking to articulate something that has a larger truth about the institution, choosing certain events and spinning a story and meaning and conclusions from those events,’ he says. ‘No one ever pretended it was history. But I think maybe audiences were more naive about that.’
CHARLES MOORE has found daft boffins at the American Psychological Association to support his theory that Olivia Colman, pictured, has a Left-wing face. Conservative types ‘tended to have larger lower faces’, writes his lordship in The Spectator. And liberals ‘tend to smile more intensely and genuinely’. He adds: ‘If one mugshot can reveal a person’s politics, no conservative will get a job in the public sector or the BBC.’
A PHOTOGRAPH in the Times Literary Supplement of David Tennant as Hamlet clutching a skull has attracted a complaint. ‘The photograph does not mention the pianist Andre Tchaikowsky,’ writes Henry Merritt. ‘When he died in 1982, he left his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use in Hamlet and Tennant was the first actor to honour that intention.’
PRESENTER and one-time ‘thinking man’s crumpet’ Joan Bakewell is unimpressed the Garrick Club will allow female members. She announces: ‘I’m with Groucho on this!’ The late Groucho Marx famously said: ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me.’
FRESH from his triumph at getting women into the Garrick, Stephen Fry went for a celebratory dinner at the Beefsteak, a trough that never permits female guests. Was Fry having a giraffe?