Boris gets that sinking feeling

The Times (London)
September 2, 2017 Saturday


Boris gets that sinking feeling

 by Patrick Kidd

"No more of that ghastly Johnson family," pleads a TMS reader. Maybe
we should have a moratorium on stories about the blond clan but only
after this one sent in by someone who was an intern at The Spectator
when Boris was its editor.

The Armenian ambassador was at a lunch and my spy heard BoJo,
discovering where the guest was from, say: "My great-grandfather
worked for the last Ottoman Sultan. Did they have anything to do with
Armenia?"

The ambassador's face turned to stone. "Yes," he said. "They massacred
thousands of my people."

A chill fell over the lunch before Boris tried to rescue things. "I'm
MP for Henley," he said. "You know, the regatta. Jolly boating weather
and all that. Er . . . do you row in Armenia?" No wonder he became our
chief diplomat.


Twenty years after she became a global acting star in Titanic, Kate
Winslet, above, tells Glamour that she had other ambitions as a child.
"I had a fleeting idea about becoming a hairdresser," she says, "but I
cut off a friend's earlobe trying to cut their hair. I saw him again
not long ago. He said: 'You can still see the marks'."

pressing engagement As Ramsay Bolton, one of the archvillains in Game
of Thrones, Iwan Rheon was voted "most hated man on television" by The
New York Times last year. Donald Trump will have been disappointed.
The Welsh actor has his fans, though. He was at a convention in
Nashville recently where a man asked if he would propose to his
girlfriend for him. "I think you should do it," Rheon said. The man
explained that he would do it first but wanted to take a photo of the
actor on his knee with a ring, too. Luckily she stuck with the
boyfriend.

judi is upstaged at last Dame Judi Dench has had a fine acting career,
with ten Baftas and an Oscar in her loo, but her star is starting to
wane with the young. She was recently out with her redheaded
20-year-old grandson, she tells Saga magazine, and was asked for a
photo. "Oh lovely," she said.

"Of course." But it was the grandson whom they wanted. "He looks
uncannily like Ed Sheeran," Dench explains. When she mentioned this to
her agent, he contacted Sheeran and the singer sportingly sent her
grandson a message that read: "I hear I look a lot like you." Words to
melt a grandma's heart.

After his poll ratings plunged during two months of aloof silence,
Emmanuel Macron has decided to make himself more accessible again. The
French president has promised to give two radio addresses to the
nation every month. Gossip in the Élysée says that he has chosen radio
rather than television in order to keep down his make-up bills, which
were running at £8,000 a month.

gone to pot Rosa Monckton runs a charity in Brighton called Team
Domenica that helps adults with learning difficulties. It has a café
where they can experience work. One young man was showing a customer
all the loose-leaf tea they serve. "That's Assam, that's Earl Grey,
that's Oolong and that's er..." He searched his memory. "Ah yes, my
dad's got some," he finally said. "That's marijuana." Gives a new
meaning to the phrase "...and one for the pot".

patrick kidd