EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: King Charles rejected Heathrow Terminal 5 being named after him earlier this year… But might he have accepted if they had offered to rename the airport in his honour?
The King rejected the naming of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 in his honour earlier this year.
But might he have accepted if they had offered to re-name the airport after him?
It wasn’t until the 62nd year of her reign that Heathrow’s Terminal 2 was finally named in honour of the Queen.
Now the French have named their airport at Le Touquet after her.
Airports here are often named after celebrities such as George Best (Belfast) and John Lennon (Liverpool).
Would His Majesty have accepted Heathrow being renamed in his honour, a la the Liverpool John Lennon Airport and George Best Belfast City Airport
Liz Truss’s 14-strong resignation honours list, after just 49 days in office, is making very slow progress through the vetting process.
Might some of the suggested honorees have pleaded NOT to be on it and new potential recipients found?
The PM with the shortest tenure overall, other than Ms Truss, was Sir Alec Douglas-Home in 1964.
After 363 days in office he gonged 13 people, with no peerages (Ms Truss has reportedly put forward four).
Five medals went to staff rather than political allies – two detectives, a telephonist, a driver and his butler.
When shock-rocker Alice Cooper arrived for his first UK tour in the 1970s, with an act that had included throwing live chickens into the audience, stabbing dolls and a sparking ‘electric chair’ as used in US executions, anti-porn campaigner Mary Whitehouse spoke out against him, as did Labour MP Leo Abse.
Cooper sent flowers to the former and cigars to the latter.
‘I loved it, you couldn’t buy press like that,’ he says. And now? ‘Now I can’t think of any way to shock people. Audiences are shock-proof.’
The BBC’s desire to advertise its wokish credentials extended to India’s Moon landing with newsreader Sophie Raworth describing the craft as ‘uncrewed’ rather than ‘unmanned’.
Meanwhile, its world athletics coverage showed Norwegian 1,500m runner Jakob Ingebrigtsen beaten to world championship gold by a Briton for the second year running with Steve Cram commenting: ‘Ingebrigtsen must be thinking, “I’m never going to Great Britain on holiday”.’
The BBC Sport website had Cram saying: ‘Ingebrigtsen must be thinking, “I’m never going on holiday to Great Britain and Northern Ireland anymore.’
BBC’s world athletics coverage showed Norwegian 1,500m runner Jakob Ingebrigtsen beaten to world championship gold by a Briton for the second year running with Steve Cram commenting: ‘Ingebrigtsen must be thinking, “I’m never going to Great Britain on holiday”’
Netflix’s current season of The Crown suggests Charles attempted to push his mother into abdication in 1992, described as ‘damaging malicious fiction’ by then PM John Major.
Surely this would have happened ten years later, on the Queen’s 2002 Golden Jubilee.
Charles’s advisers at the time – including Michael Fawcett – reasoned the jubilee year marked the best opportunity to get Charles on the throne early.
The deaths of the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret early in 2002 had left the Queen feeling vulnerable.
However, the monarch sent in her formidable treasurer, Sir Michael Peat, to sort out Charles’s ‘dysfunctional’ household.
Mentioning his company’s ITVX streaming service, Kevin Lygo says: ‘I was offered On The Buses the other day. I’ve never watched [it] in my life.’
Perhaps he should. The vulgar comedy had 16m viewers at its 1970s peak, far more than ITV’s current comedies.
A TV source says: ‘Why not just admit his family were far too posh to watch anything on “the other side” back then.’
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