Exposed: the neo-Nazi past of the Duke of Edinburgh

If only as a public service it falls to us to examine Mohamed Al Fayed’s description of the Duke of Edinburgh as “a racist who grew up with Nazis”.

Outraged royalists get in touch to point out that, while three of his sisters were, indeed, members of the Nazi party (including Sophie who, ouch, gave her son the middle name Adolf), not enough mention is ever made of the Duke’s mother, Princess Alice of Greece, who was awarded the title of Righteous among the Nations for her part in sheltering Greek Jews from the Gestapo.

The young Philip, moreover, was much influenced by Kurt Hahn, his German-Jewish headmaster (at Schloss Salem in Germany and, later, at Gordonstoun), who was jailed for criticising Hitler. So, no Nazi, he.

His ginger-haired grandson, on the other hand . . .

— Natalie Portman (above) appeared to be in a curious mood last night about just what was going through the mind of the Prince of Wales as he watched the latest film featuring one of his ancestors. "It must have been so strange to see a film version of your family," wondered the starlet, who stars with Scarlett Johansson as the sisters Anne and Mary Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl

— “Ricky [Gervais} is actually my type,” Lily Allen tells a less fortunate Martin Freeman (best known as Tim from The Office) on her new BBC Three chat show, Lily Allen and Friends. “I quite like the older man. Has he got a hairy back? I like men with a bit of meat and a bit of hair. Not on the head though. I prefer them bald.”

How picky she sounds, albeit in an easy-to-please sort of way.

— Spotted by the bike racks at the Houses of Parliament: Desmond Swayne, David Cameron’s famously devoted parliamentary private secretary, squatting down, wearing a thick woolly jumper against the cold, with a bicycle in one hand and a wheel in the other. People trusts that the boneshaker was his own.

Surely Dave fixes his own punctured tyres. Doesn’t he?

— Drama, of an unintended sort, on stage at a performance of Dad’s Army — the Lost Episodes at the Hackney Empire. During the curtain call, we are told, an audience member leapt on to the stage and stole Sid the Seagull, a vital prop. The matter has now been reported to the police.

The thief is described as 5ft 10in (1.8m), overweight, 40-ish, and with dark hair. Sid is described as 18 in and attached to a grey oval base.

— Kate Nash, the flame-haired singer, tells Harp magazine in America of a recent bit of thievery in a restaurant.

“There was this big picture of a butterfly hanging next to our table, and I grabbed it off the wall and put it in my bag when we left,” she says.

“The restaurant was rubbish, but at least I got something good out of it. I’m kind of a moral thief in that way.”

— The great David Suchet, best known for playing Poirot, missed immortality by a whisker. At the launch of The Bank Job, in which he plays a pornographer, Suchet told us that, at one point, the Belgians were keen to put him, as Poirot, on a coin. “Representatives of the Belgian mint got in touch with my agent,” he said, “but then the currency switched to the euro. All my hopes were dashed.”

— A peculiar outburst from David Cameron on Farming Today on Radio 4 (no, we weren’t up then, either). Asked whether he shopped in supermarkets or local shops, Dave waffled on for a while about his butcher, before adding: “I use the Sainsbury’s on Ladbroke Grove. Only the other day I was shopping there and Neil Kinnock was at the next check out. What about that, eh?” Sounding almost starstruck.

Postscript

Shameless punnery from next week’s Bath Literature Festival, which has been lent a golden taxi by the local Residence Hotel. Actors will sit inside and recite poetry to punters. “It’s a great vehicle for introducing people to poetry,” trills a spokeswoman. “It goes from bard to verse!” Enough.

— “I just saw an ad for an assistant stage manager,” Michael Caine tells Sky Movies Magazine, “and wandered into the world of theatre.” Nothing simpler.

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