Ephraim Hardcastle

BUCKINGHAM Palace remains optimistic that the Duke of Sussex will attend his father’s Coronation, with Harry hoping he will not have to pay homage to Queen Consort Camilla. He has made no secret of his antipathy towards his stepmother, telling 60 Minutes: ‘She was the villain, she was a third person in the marriage. The need for her to rehabilitate her image… that made her dangerous.’ He has been struggling with the prospect of watching the woman who ‘replaced’ his mother wearing the crown that should have been Diana’s, and being anointed just a few yards from where her coffin had rested at Westminster Abbey. A royal source whispers only William will now pay homage to his dad with Harry remaining in his seat, adding: ‘Harry will not have to pass the Queen Consort and bow as he does so.’ Problematis solvendis?

KING Charles and Queen Consort Camilla would be forgiven for rejoicing in any setback suffered by Boris’s legal adviser Lord Pannick during the ex-PM’s Partygate grilling. For Pannick threw a judicial spanner in the royal couple’s wedding plans in 2005 when he claimed that under the 1949 Marriages Act they could only wed in a church and not a register office. ‘It is very doubtful that this custom has ceased to exist,’ he pontificated. ‘To avoid a royal flush of embarrassment, [they] need to find an archbishop, or a vicar, who is available at short notice to do the deed in a church.’ Charles and Camilla ignored Pannick and had a civil marriage at Windsor Register Office.

LEFT-wing playwright David Hare compares the blink-and-you’ll-missit occupancy of Downing Street by Liz Truss, pictured, to the golfing term ‘mulligan’ where you ‘completely miss the ball and ask for it not to count’. This seems to be the Tory party’s ‘approach to her premiership’, he says. ‘In spite of her election being entirely their fault.’ Neither an eagle nor an albatross, more of a triple bogie Liz!

COMMONS privilege committee chairman Harriet Harman failed to display any sisterly compassion to Boris. This was despite her first cousin Rachel Billington being the ex-PM’s godmother.

CHANNEL 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy, recalling Jimmy Savile’s appearance with teenagers on his first BBC TV show Open to Question, describes the late pervert as ‘weird and creepy as hell’. But he does admit to innocently reaching out to Savile. ‘The one TV show I wrote to was Jim’ll Fix It.’

ROBERT Powell, playing the title role in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, raised his voice filming the sermon on the mount and an echo came back from the other side of the valley. ‘I started to cry and all the camera crew were in floods of tears. Something happened,’ he tells BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions. Perhaps it was his then new bride Babs Lord from Top of the Pops dance troupe Pan’s People wondering aloud why the film was an interminable six and a half hours long.