EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: How ITN avoided awkward royal encounter

Despite holiday staff shortages at ITN, up and coming reporter Willem Marx fortuitously wasn’t assigned coverage of Meghan Markle’s anti-royal Spotify podcast.

It might have been awkward. Willem was Kate Middleton’s pre-William boyfriend, dating her when they both attended Marlborough College. 

Now happily married to TV presenter Johanna Botta he remains on good terms with Kate, accepting an invitation to her wedding in 2011. 

While ITN royal editor Chris Ship recounted Meghan’s misery at being forced on an official engagement after a fire in Archie’s bedroom, Willem was dispatched to Wembley to cover footballer Jill Scott’s retirement.

Prince Charles’s deep-freeze relations with China’s president Xi Jinping may be thawing. His Sustainable Markets Initiative, aimed at making businesses greener, has set up shop in Jiangxi. Might the prince, who has boycotted state visits by Chinese presidents in the past, be about to summon his Travelling Yeoman for a trip to Beijing?

Prince Charles has announced that business leaders from across the globe will gather, via his Sustainable Markets Initiative and its Terra Carta Action Forum, in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, on November 7 and 8

Pass the smelling salts. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s sister Annunziata, pictured, has been propositioned in Mayfair by a twenty-something smartly dressed bloke who mewled: ‘I just had to come over to tell you I find you extremely attractive.’ 

‘It wasn’t a nice experience,’ says Annunziata, 43, who repelled the amorous advances. ‘It got my guard up. Why would anyone do that to a stranger (let alone one old enough to be their mother!)???.’ 

She has suffered worse. When she was seeking a Tory seat, David Cameron said her name was too posh. She rejected his alternative moniker, Nancy Mogg.

Might departing Boris give Cabinet Secretary Simon Case a gong? He picked up a CVO in 2017 for 16 months’ service as private secretary to David Cameron and Theresa May but nothing since.  The chief mandarin is usually given a K on appointment, but nothing so far for Case, not even membership of the Privy Council, which is usually automatic. Whoever gets the keys to Downing Street, is Simon heading for the job centre?

David Cameron gave an MBE to his barber Lino Carbosiero and an OBE to Sam Cam’s stylist Isabel Spearman, while Thea Rogers, the adviser who imposed the infamous ‘austerity haircut’ on George Osborne received an MBE.  Will Boris gong his hairdresser – if only as consolation for constantly sabotaging, with a ruffle, the stylist’s handiwork?

Hoping to board the romance carousel again following the death of her partner Guido Castro last year, Maureen Lipman – she lost hubby playwright Jack Rosenthal in 2004 – says: ‘I’m not necessarily looking for love, although there’s much to be said for getting up to go to the loo in the night and returning to that leg in the bed.’ Has Scotland Yard been informed?