EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: Keir Starmer's schoolboy dust-up

EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: Keir Starmer’s schoolboy dust-up

Sir Keir Starmer startles LBC interviewer Nick Ferrari by admitting that, as a schoolboy at Reigate Grammar, he indulged in fisticuffs. 

‘Did you ever get a detention?’ asks Ferrari. ‘I did get a detention for fighting,’ admits Starmer. 

‘Who did you fight?’

‘I can’t remember,’ replies Starmer. ‘But they were always around the back of the sheds. There were bits and bobs going on, yeah.’ 

Should new PM Rishi Sunak don boxing gloves at PMQs tomorrow?

Backbencher Michael Fabricant, who championed Boris’s return, rages at his withdrawal. He tells GB News that supporters aren’t happy, adding: ‘They feel they’ve been led to the top of a hill fighting for him… this is the second time this has happened – it happened in 2015. It might be ‘Hasta la vista, baby’ but I don’t know how many people will support him a third time around.’ Keep your hair on, Michael!

U2 warbler Bono recalls his close shave when a Dublin record shop where he should have been making his regular after-school visit in May 1974 was blown up by a Loyalist car bomb, killing 14. He writes in his upcoming memoir: ‘The only reason I wasn’t standing in the record store is that a bus strike meant we’d had to cycle to school. We were already home when the streets around Dolphin Discs were blown to bits.’

Spare a thought for Bob Geldof this festive season, having to endure yet again his Band Aid charity ditty, Do They Know It’s Christmas?

‘The song has a life of its own,’ wails Geldof, pictured, to Radio Times. 

‘It’s played in every f****** supermarket. It’s Mistletoe And Wine at vegetables, Slade at baked beans, Wizzard for tea and coffee, and Band Aid at the butcher’s counter. I mean… it drives me f****** mad.’

Evergreen actress Anne Reid, 87, who enjoyed a tryst with Daniel Craig in the fruity film The Mother, mentioned the bunk-up during a cabaret performance and was startled when an audience member shouted: ‘I did a film with Daniel Craig, too. And I went to bed with him twice!’ It was chum Derek Jacobi, 84, who bedded the ex-007 when he portrayed Francis Bacon in Love Is The Devil.

Promoting his memoirs at Cadogan Hall, Hugh Bonneville admits that as a six-year-old, he did not get on with his sister Clare. ‘She really needed to go,’ he recalls. ‘So I dug her grave. I said to my mum, ‘I have really had it up to here. Mum, I am going to dig her grave’. She said, ‘All right dear. You know where the spade is.’

Musician Kenny Clayton, who has died at the age of 86, once played a prank on Cilla Black when conducting in the orchestra pit at Scarborough after discovering she could only see him above chest height. ‘I dressed immaculately in my dinner jacket and shirt but nothing else,’ he recalled. ‘At the end of the show, Cilla decided to walk to the edge of the stage to talk to the audience. I’ll never forget her face.’

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