EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: With little prospect of Huw Edwards returning, there are sighs of relief at Buckingham Palace he wasn’t awarded a Royal Victorian Order

Huw Edwards, the BBC’s suspended royal ceremonial anchor, was absent from yesterday’s Parliamentary excitement and won’t be covering Saturday night’s Festival of Remembrance in front of the King. With little prospect of him returning, there are sighs of relief at Buckingham Palace that he wasn’t awarded a Royal Victorian Order.

His name was discussed for a CVO, which is in the monarch’s personal gift, after his sensitive announcement of the Queen’s death and his anchoring of her state funeral and Charles’s Coronation. 

Huw Edwards, the BBC’s suspended royal ceremonial anchor, won’t be covering Saturday night’s Festival of Remembrance in front of the King

There are sighs of relief at Buckingham Palace that he wasn’t awarded a Royal Victorian Order

It wouldn’t have been without precedent. Previous royal commentators Peter Dimmock, Tom Fleming and Sir Antony Jay all got CVOs.

There has been no CVO, or any other gong, for David Dimbleby, 85, who anchors the BBC’s Cenotaph coverage – an event he has made his own since taking over from Tom Fleming in 1999. His dad Richard, once the frontman for state occasions, was an OBE and then CBE. Even his son, Henry, 53, got an MBE in 2015 – not for spouting on TV but for improving school dinners. 

Keen to put a fresh coat of paint on his charitable endeavours, Charles wants to rename his Prince’s Foundation the King’s Foundation. Talks are said to be under way with the current holders of that name – a sports-for-the-young charity based in Sheffield. But there are more than a dozen other charities that can claim they got there first. Charles may be sovereign of all he surveys but he does not, alas, rule trademark laws.

Breakfast TV viewers lulled by Lorraine Kelly’s soporific meanderings are probably unaware of her compassionate on-the-spot reporting from the 1988 Lockerbie Pan Am atrocity. 

Now, 35 years later, she returns to make a documentary, telling Radio Times: ‘Women in the town gathered the clothes the dead had been wearing, washed away the dirt and the blood and carefully wrapped them up to send to bereaved relatives.’

Lorraine Kelley gave compassionate on-the-spot reporting from the 1988 Lockerbie Pan Am atrocity, and now returns to the area for a documentary 

Lorraine, pictured, adds: ‘I always believed people in Lockerbie didn’t receive proper recognition for their incredible generosity of spirit.’

Polymath Stephen Fry recalls his admiration for Bill Clinton after watching the former US President give a 40-minute lecture on Aids without notes at Westminster Hall. 

Stephen Fry has spoken of his admiration for former United States President Bill Clinton, after he gave a lecture at Westminster Hall without notes

‘Behind me was the actor Anthony Andrews, and he’s quite a sort of posh figure, and he was with his wife, Georgina who is also very posh,’ says Fry. ‘As we were giving him an ovation at the end, I overheard Anthony say to his wife 

‘Well I don’t know about you darling, but I’d throw my pants at him’.’ Georgina, scion of the Simpsons of Piccadilly family, remained po-faced and mute.

Boy George should have Dyno-Rod clear his ears after accusing Princess Margaret in his new book of calling him a ‘tart’. What she actually said after viewing George’s elaborate make-up, accentuating the eyes, was ‘He’s like the Commedia dell’arte’. He thought she said ‘He’s a common old tart’.

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