Ephraim Hardcastle
SHOULD Rishi Sunak confound the opinion polls and remain in Downing Street while Donald Trump regains the White House, wouldn’t Boris Johnson be the ideal candidate as Rishi’s ambassador in Washington? If Keir Starmer triumphs he might have a harder time placating a resurgent president. Prospective foreign secretary David Lammy once said: ‘The man is a racist. The man has Ku Klux members in his inner team. The man thinks it is OK to have protesting Nazis on the streets.’ Yvette Cooper, a likely home secretary, warned of the ‘dangers’ of Trump ‘whipping up hatred and prejudice’. Trump doesn’t forget such slights. Starmer could confound by dispatching Donald’s BFF Nigel Farage as envoy.
IF THE BBC’s Nick Robinson can muddy the waters for Boris in relation to Trump he will. Reviewing Boris’s Mail column lauding The Donald, Robinson slyly whispers: ‘You may remember that Boris Johnson wasn’t always that polite about Donald Trump. In fact he was extremely rude about him in previous times when he said he was unfit to be president.’ Clearly Robinson thinks people shouldn’t be able to change their minds. He will be hoping that the BBC, desperate to stamp out any perception of bias, doesn’t change its mind about him in the anticipated reshuffle of Today programme presenters.
DANNII Minogue’s fling with her X Factor boss Simon Cowell clearly riled judge Sharon Osbourne, who said the couple were ‘all over each other’ before a live show. ‘They were, like, canoodling. She was not really a woman’s woman,’ Sharon says of Dannii, pictured. ‘She is a man eater. They were giggling and he had his arms around her, whispering. The music starts and I look at her and grabbed her hand. I was digging my nails in. I threw water over Louis Walsh. Who would I throw water over today? Dannii? I wouldn’t waste the water. I am such a bitch.’ Miaow.
MIGHT the King, currently out of commission, regret asking Parliament for a law change to promote Princess Anne and Prince Edward without removing Harry and Andrew? With William taking time out to care for Kate and Edward today off to St Helena, that leaves only Camilla and Anne able to act as counsellors of state. Should they be rendered hors de combat he’d have to, in extremis, call on either Harry or Andrew.
BOWING out of the Republican nomination race, Ron DeSantis profoundly announces: ‘Winston Churchill once remarked that “success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts”.’ Awkwardly, according to The International Churchill Society, Winston never said the words. They’ve instead been traced back to a 1938 Budweiser beer advert.
ACTOR Larry Dann, fondly remembered as Sgt Alec Peters in The Bill, recalls his final appearance in the ITV police soap: ‘I went upstairs for a pencil and didn’t come down.’ Shades of Paul Henry’s Benny. He popped out of the Crossroads motel for a spanner and wasn’t seen for a year.