Bafta-winning photographer Alison Jackson – who specialises in amusing images featuring lookalikes of the rich, famous and powerful – is planning to stage a show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival later this month.
She has, however, encountered a serious problem.
The show was due to include doppelgangers of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, but Jackson has failed to cast actors to play them with little more than a fortnight until the curtain goes up.
‘I have a couple of ‘Prince Williams’ who’ve come forward and they look quite good, but no ‘Meghan’ or ‘Harry’ has turned up,’ she tells me.
The artist, 65, claims this is because the Sussexes have become such toxic figures that no one wants to play them.
‘I think that people don’t like Meghan, they don’t trust her and they think she’s an operator who sucks everything she can out of Harry,’ Jackson claims. She explains that her lookalikes ‘tend to relate to’ the person they are playing.
Jackson blames Harry’s explosive interview with the BBC in May after he lost a legal challenge over his taxpayer-funded security in Britain. The California-based prince said the King ‘won’t speak to me because of this security stuff’, but that he did not want to fight any more and did ‘not know how much longer my father has’.
Jackson tells me: ‘He’s gone too far, because every time he does a TV interview he takes some dig at King Charles, which is below the belt and beyond the pale and people don’t like it. He implied that his father might die.’
Alison Jackson is known for her humourous photographs featuring celebrity lookalikes
Harry and Meghan pictured last year. Jackson says their drop in popularity has scared off people playing their lookalikes
She previously had lookalikes of Harry, 40, and Meghan, who turned 44 yesterday, but says ‘they now won’t come forward’.
Jackson adds: ‘As Meghan gets more and more assertive, the lookalikes disappear. They’ve probably all cut their hair short and look different.’
It will be a case of On His Majesty’s Secret Service! King Charles is seeking a £55,000-a-year security head to vet his own staff.
The successful candidate must identify any security risks among workers. An advert says the ‘senior personnel security manager’ will be based at Buckingham Palace, but will oversee ‘security services across multiple royal residences’.
Love is in the air for Lord Brocket’s son
William Nall-Cain is 6ft8, making his lawyer wife Christy Boulet seem very petite indeed
The happy couple on their big day
At 6ft 8in, William Nall-Cain was always going to find it a tall order to choose a bride who could measure up to him.
Happily, the son of former I’m A Celebrity star Lord Brocket has met his match in Christy Boulet, a lawyer from Puerto Rico where his mother, former model Isabel Lorenzo Brocket, was also born.
In a picture posted online, William, 34, towers over his new wife at their wedding in the Caribbean island’s capital, San Juan.
‘There is no one else on this planet who makes me feel like anything in this life is possible, and like the luckiest man alive,’ William has said of his bride.
Earlier this year, I disclosed that his sister, Antalya, had separated from her husband, Prince Alexander von Preussen, less than five years after their wedding near Brocket Hall, her ancestral home in Hertfordshire.
Sir Grayson’s all fired up
He made his name with ceramics depicting child abuse and sado-masochism before being embraced by the Establishment.
And Sir Grayson Perry is sick of rich and famous Leftie-types posing as revolutionaries.
‘One of the things that absolutely infuriates me is millionaire cultural celebrities pretending they’re outsider rebels,’ declares the cross-dressing potter, 65.
Who’s in the Spice Girls’ group chat?
The Spice Girls once sang that ‘friendship never ends’, but it can clearly become strained over time.
Melanie Chisholm, aka Sporty Spice, has revealed Victoria Beckham and Geri Halliwell are excluded from some of their WhatsApp chat groups.
‘There are subgroups within the group,’ Mel C admits in an interview Down Under.
‘I definitely know there is a chat group that doesn’t contain me, but somewhere else we keep Ginger or Posh out. Like all friendship groups, we have many ways of communicating.’
Chisholm, 51, who was the only one of the four other Spice Girls to attend Mel B’s second wedding to Rory McPhee in Morocco at the weekend, also admits she regrets not holding on to her outfits from the pop group’s heyday.
Julie dresses as she likes it for birthday bash
The Countess of Sandwich in fancy dress at Powderham Castle near Exeter
Usually seen wearing Lycra while performing yoga poses at her husband’s Mapperton estate in Dorset, the Countess of Sandwich opted for a medieval look at a fellow aristocrat’s ancestral home at the weekend.
American-born Julie Montagu, 51, wore a red velvet gown for the Earl of Devon’s fancy dress birthday party at Powderham Castle near Exeter.
The bash had Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It for its theme. ‘I took it very seriously,’ the countess says.
She and her husband, Luke, the 12th Earl of Sandwich, have been running the family’s Mapperton estate since 2016, with wellness retreats among her initiatives.
A qualified yoga instructor, Julie, became the Countess of Sandwich after the death of her father-in-law, 81, in February.
Kirstie’s parenting hoo-haa
Kirstie Allsopp has been complaining about children having too much screen time… on a small screen of her own
Location, Location, Location star Kirstie Allsopp is aghast at a sorry display of modern parenting.
‘I’m staying in a hotel in Switzerland, just had breakfast next to an English couple with one child, probably aged five,’ says the television presenter, 53.
‘He ate his breakfast watching an iPad on the table in front of him,’ the presenter complains on X.
She goes on to ask her 431,800 followers: ‘When are people going to wake up to how wrong this is?’ Kirstie, who has two teenage sons with her husband, property developer Ben Andersen, as well as two adult stepsons, adds: ‘This is absurd. If they can’t be bothered to engage their child in conversation at the table when they don’t have to cook or wash up, then what hope is there?’
Her comments prompted a mixed response online, with some parents and teachers noting the ‘damage’ caused to children by excessive screen time.
Others were less sympathetic, prompting Kirstie to respond: ‘It’s quite interesting to note that the vast majority of abuse is from men.’
