PRINCE HARRY is “out of touch with reality,” writer Tina Brown has claimed as the fall-out continues from his comments about ensuring the Queen is “protected”.
“When that came up on my phone I was just rocked. I sat there thinking, ‘This is unbelievably arrogant to the rest of the family’,” Brown, right, says. The former Tatler, Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor is releasing The Palace Papers, a book on the royals tomorrow. Harry, left, told an interviewer last week he wanted to make sure his grandmother was “protected” — and also spoke about their closeness.
Brown said Harry and his wife Meghan seem equally deluded. “They stoke each other with this illusion that they’ve been put on the earth to save the world,” she said. “It’s a laudable goal, but wildly unspecific. Harry has an absolute winner with Invictus [Games].... but otherwise they’ve been sitting in Montecito for two years, making announcements. I just don’t think it behooves them to be lecturing anyone.”
“I think he has developed an enormously inflated ego and sense of himself [as evidenced by] his smirking comment about, ‘I have such a special relationship with the Queen’,” Brown told The Daily Beast. Now that’s blowback.
Why partygate won’t blow over
BORIS JOHNSON will be hoping the public forgets his No 10 lockdown parties. But political playwright James Graham doesn’t think they will. The Nottinghamshire-born writer tells us that friends in the red wall are “still talking about it”, because the scandal went against “that English need for fairness”. “We all played by the rules and he didn’t,” he says. But don’t expect a new production any time soon: “Plays are always better when you discover something that is unknown and we all know everything that’s happened here.”
Final bow for cult star Lacoste?
JIMOTHY LACOSTE, the cult north London music star, is on the verge of quitting the industry. “These days I’ve not been well, I’ve not been feeling myself... I don’t know if I will continue doing what I do,” he wrote online recently, alongside photos of himself in hospital with a bruised and swollen left eye. The Camden man, inset, rose to fame with his lo-fi, deadpan rap and tongue-in-cheek music videos. Now he tells fans: “I need to get this ambition back and I will try all I can do to get it back.”
SW1A
RISHI SUNAK is bottom of the latest ConHome Cabinet league table survey of Tory members, released today. The Chancellor regularly came top during the pandemic, but is now the only minister with a negative approval rating. Top is defence man Ben Wallace. Anyone for another eat out to help out?
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LORD PALUMBO is dead keen on dogs. When the peer, who founded Ministry of Sound, was asked if he preferred them to people, he replied: “There is that English idea that people who are obsessed with dogs can’t have normal relationships. And I probably can’t.” Fair play.
CLAIRE DANES posed with Tom Hiddleston at a screening of their show The Essex Serpent at the Ham Yard Hotel last night, while in Stratford-upon-Avon Dames Judi Dench and Joanna Lumley joined Stephen Fry and Adrian Lester at the RSC to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday. Also there were Rebekah Brooks, who launches new channel Talk TV today, and husband Charlie.
