EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: Having placated India over the disputed Koh-i-Noor diamond… does King Charles now face a Coronation tantrum from South Africa?
Having hopefully placated India‘s Narendra Modi by mothballing the disputed Koh-i-Noor from the Queen Consort’s crown, King Charles could now be heading for a Coronation tantrum from South Africa‘s president Cyril Ramaphosa.
Queen Mary’s crown, which Camilla will wear, is being fitted with some of the nine diamonds cut from the Cullinan stone, a gift to Edward VII from the Transvaal government in 1907.
Ramaphosa would like it returned. But the largest chunk of the Cullinan is the Great Star of Africa in the sceptre that will be handed to Charles during his crowning.
Ramaphosa wants that, too.
Queen Mary’s crown (pictured), which Camilla will wear, is being fitted with some of the nine diamonds cut from the Cullinan stone, a gift to Edward VII from the Transvaal government in 1907
King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort visit to Brick Lane in east London on February 8
Gold, the BBC’s Brink’s-Mat robbery series, highlights villain Kenneth Noye’s membership of the Freemasons. He was expelled over his criminal record. Senior royals including the late Queen’s father George VI were also masons.
Have current Grand Master the Duke of Kent and senior Freemason Prince Michael been watching Gold, reciting the masonic mantra, ‘There is no right way to do wrong’?
When Raquel Welch attended son Damon’s wedding to cricketer Freddie Trueman’s daughter Rebecca in 1990, she sent seismic tremors through the Yorkshire Dales, with Freddie’s mother Ethel saying she looked like a trollop.
The bowler’s ex-wife Enid declared: ‘Her boobs were showing and her skirt was up her bum.’
Freddie, who may be enjoying a celestial reunion with Raquel, was less censorious. ‘She was’, he chuckled, ‘a little smasher.’
Tom Stoppard, a surprise attendee at journalist Charlie Wilson’s St Brides memorial service last month, paid a personal tribute to Paul Johnson yesterday at his funeral mass in Bayswater’s St Mary of the Angels.
While the playwright once briefly shared a Bristol flat with Wilson, he dedicated his 1978 play Night And Day to Paul, telling the congregation, including Michael Gove, that in a warm friendship of over 50 years he admired Johnson’s Catholic faith.
Colin Firth as Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary
Colin Firth, whose steamy Mr Darcy in Pride And Prejudice remains in the top ten of the female knee-trembler stakes, has been outed as a bad kisser.
Film-maker Emma Freud reveals Colin was distinctly below par in the snogging department in Bridget Jones’s Diary.
‘On Love Actually’, she explains, ‘he needed a kiss co-ordinator.’
Alan Bennett’s conclusion in The Madness Of George III that the daft monarch suffered from porphyria needs to be amended, according to psychiatrist Colin Brewer.
Referring to a medical study blaming Alzheimer’s, he writes in The London Review Of Books: ‘I wonder if it isn’t time to acknowledge that the diagnostic theory that was so popular when Bennett wrote the play has been exploded?’
The Absent Mindedness of King George III doesn’t quite do the job, alas.
With Coronation invitations as rare as hen’s teeth, Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Anne Glenconner, has secured her seat in Westminster Abbey.
She tells The New Yorker of when she was sitting next to King Charles at supper.
‘I am going to be a bit cheeky now,’ she told His Majesty, putting in her request right then, adding: ‘They have to be reminded.’