Excluded from the Garter parade, Prince Andrew’s public banishment continued yesterday with his non-appearance at Royal Ascot. At least the disgraced Duke was invited to the Windsor Castle lunch before the King, Queen and other royals took part in the carriage procession to the nearby course. My source whispers that Andrew is sometimes on hand to help entertain guests, especially on days when other royals are thin on the ground, although dressed in his best bib and tucker he isn’t allowed to join them on the course. At least he is spared the washing up.
Compare and contrast Donald Trump’s £33million Washington military parade with the £60,000 estimated cost of the Trooping the Colour, the King’s birthday parade, on the same day. The bill included ‘crown feeding’ (rations for troops and horses), temporary stables and transport hire. But not security. Nor the funds from royal regiment colonels to allow soldiers to quench their thirsts. Pity the Coldstream Guards, who were the stars of this year’s Trooping. They haven’t had a royal colonel since Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, passed away in 1850.
The Duchess of York, pictured, was afforded three pages in a broadsheet newspaper yesterday to spout about the scars inflicted by a traumatic childhood and life in the public eye. ‘All of this inspired my recent visit to Paracelsus Recovery in Zurich,’ she wrote. ‘Which kindly hosted me as a guest.’ Unless you’re Freebie Fergie, the clinic charges around £100,000 for a week’s treatment.
The Who’s Pete Townshend is resigned to never replicating bandmate Roger Daltrey’s Birthday Honours List gong. Having received a police caution in 2003 for accessing child abuse images while researching, Pete spent five years on the sex offenders register. He reckons: ‘The only thing that must be frustrating for those people who distribute gongs up in London, they probably want to give me a knighthood but they can’t.’
Comic Harry Hill takes issue with Grayson Perry for accepting a knighthood, telling a podcast: ‘I tackled Grayson, ‘cos when Wordsworth accepted the Poet Laureate post, Robert Browning wrote a poem about it and it starts, “For a handful of silver he left us, just for a ribbon to stick on his coat”. In Grayson’s case, was it a dress?’
Rick Wakeman, in dire financial straits in the 1980s and sleeping outdoors in Kensington Gardens, is asked by a music magazine: how did that happen? ‘It’s called divorce,’ replies the former Yes frontman. ‘I’ve had four wives, three divorces, which are very expensive.’