Royal etiquette can be terrifying. The Earl of Snowdon, who died on Friday, did most family snaps but for the christening of David Linley, his first child with Princess Margaret, Snowdon was required in front of camera so asked Robert Belton to do the “say cheese”-ing. A nervous Belton asked him how to boss the Queen around. “Just be direct,” Snowdon said. “Simply say ‘Ma’am, please could you look to the left’.” A fine idea in principle, but when it came to the shoot Belton discovered there were seven women entitled to be called ma’am. So whenever he uttered his directions seven heads swivelled as one. Sounds like a hydra, only one wearing seven tiaras.
Belton once received a telephone call from Snowdon soon after he joined the royal clan. He was calling from Buckingham Palace and Belton was frustrated by the music in the background. “I can’t hear you very well,” Belton said. “Could you turn the radio down?” “That’s not the radio,” Snowdon replied. “It’s the band. They’re changing the guard. Do you want a favourite played?”
WRY WHISKY
Throughout dry January we’ve been running stories of how men of the cloth have tried to put you off the devil’s drink. Christopher Horne writes in with a tale of a Methodist priest who during a sermon put one worm in a glass of water and another in a tumbler of whisky. By the end, the worm in the whisky had died, while the other had survived. “What does this prove?” the priest boomed. A parishioner raised his hand and responded: “That if you have worms, you should drink whisky.”
The latest book by Lady Antonia Fraser is a diary of her and her late husband Harold Pinter’s visit to Israel in 1978. My favourite passage comes from May 22. “H [Harold] buys me an enormous pair of Israeli agate earrings at the jewellery counter,” Fraser writes. “He gives his name for the bill. ‘Just like the writer,’ comments the lady behind the counter with interest, ‘including the spelling.’ ”
LAST LAUGH
At the launch of the book, I bumped into the former Tory minister Jonathan Aitken, who said that he had been one of the last to see Richard Harris, the great Irish actor. Aitken’s wife, Elizabeth, had been married to Harris for 12 years and in the summer of 2002, weeks before Harris died, they went to check on him at his suite in The Savoy. His condition was so bad he had stopped drinking Guinness and an ambulance was called. “He was always an entertainer,” Aitken said, “and he didn’t let his last audience down.” As Harris was being stretchered through the foyer past lunchtime regulars, he pulled off his oxygen mask and shouted: “It was the food. Don’t touch the food.”
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Jeremy Hunt does have a sense of humour. Despite his spending last week dodging questions while being chased by the indomitable Beth Rigby, political correspondent at Sky News, the health secretary admitted his wife saw the funny side. “My wife has threatened me,” he told a colleague. “If I annoy her, she’s going to follow me about the house with a microphone interrogating me about the NHS.”