EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: 'Spiteful' to cut Harry and Meghan's police protection, says friend

As Prince Harry plans to bring his wife Meghan back to Britain this summer for the first time in four years, one of his best friends has piled more pressure on the Government to restore the couple’s security.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were stripped of automatic taxpayer-funded police protection on their visits to Britain after they chose to quit royal duties and move to America in 2020.

Last year, King Charles’ younger son lost a legal battle with the Home Office to have it reinstated.

However, his request to the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, for a full risk assessment to be carried out was granted last December and the committee which makes the final decision on the level of police protection was expected to meet in January to discuss the reinstatement.

Alex Rayner, who went to the North Pole with Harry on a charity trek in 2012 and is in regular contact with him, suggests the two tours of duty that the duke served in Afghanistan during his ten-year Army career make him particularly vulnerable.

In an apparent reference to the King’s protection of his brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on his private Sandringham estate in Norfolk, Rayner tells me: ‘Harry is a royal who’s significantly served in the Armed Forces.

‘To ask him to pay for it privately feels a tiny bit spiteful, given that there are other members of the Royal Family who receive it who do far less.’

Harry served in war-torn Afghanistan as a forward air controller and later as an Apache helicopter pilot.

Next year, the Invictus Games, which he created to help injured and sick former soldiers, will be held here and Harry hopes Meghan will accompany him to an event this July to promote it.

‘This guy was flying Apaches in a conflict and we’ve got the Invictus Games coming up in Birmingham,’ says Rayner, who was educated at Harry’s alma mater Eton College. ‘Are we not supporting him for that?’

Rula rules out a ‘train crash’ facelif

She's one of our most familiar faces on screen, but Rula Lenska won’t be undergoing any cosmetic surgery because it has left some of her contemporaries with ‘train-crash’ looks.

‘I’ve never had a facelift – I couldn’t afford one,’ insists the Polish-born countess, 78, whose second husband was Minder and New Tricks star ­Dennis Waterman.

‘It’s a bit late for me, and certainly too expensive. Botox I have tried once or twice, mostly not very successfully – I got an eyebrow droop. And I’ve had a few injections in the skin just to plump it up.’

Speaking at the Born Free Footsteps to Freedom Ball, at the Royal Lancaster London hotel, she explains: ‘Some people have fantastic facelifts; other people have train crashes. When you don’t start to look normal or human, that’s a worry.

‘Rather than that sort of money spent on lifting an old face, I’d rather give it to charity.’

Andrew’s front row Richie seat…

Hello! Is it Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor you’re looking for? Lionel Richie is to perform this summer at Sandringham, where King Charles’s brother is moving into his new home.

‘We are very excited to announce that global superstar Lionel Richie will perform an exclusive live show at the Sandringham Estate,’ gushes a spokesman. The King, 77, met the singer, 76, in Barbados in 2019 when he was announced as global ambassador for the Prince’s Trust.

And Charles couldn’t resist joking, in a reference to Richie’s biggest hit: ‘It must have been you I was looking for.’

Why Strictly Alex is happy to look less than perfect 

She made her name starring opposite George Clooney in US hospital drama ER, but Alex Kingston is relieved to have returned to her homeland. ‘It was good to start working more back in England,’ says the Surrey-born ex-wife of Ralph Fiennes.

‘The one thing that I do feel in America is that there’s still a look that women seem to have on television that we don’t have here… very sort of coiffed, and perfect make-up. There’s this glossy American vision of a woman.’

Alex, 63, who competed on Strictly last year, adds: ‘I much prefer being here. I don’t always need to look perfect.’

Alfie blow: tea room goes bust 

He embarks on an intense, 35-date tour next month which will take him from Aberdeen to Eastbourne – via Liverpool, Leicester and Llandudno. But will Alfie Boe be thinking only of the Lake District?

It’s been the source of happy memories for the popular tenor ever since he and his eight older siblings holidayed there in childhood – memories which, in 2024, prompted him to become a director of a tea room in the car-free, cobblestoned village of Hawkshead.

But, far from bathing Boe, 52, in soothing nostalgia, Ginny’s Teapot, as the establishment is called, seems likelier to have inflicted nightmares. It’s just gone into voluntary liquidation, owing creditors £108,000 – a whopping £69,000 of it to Alfie’s own company, Ghostlight Live.

Two years ago Alfie spoke hopefully about opening a bistro, Alfie Encore, in the Lake District in 2025.

It’s yet to happen.

SAS star Georgia shares new life in a very special club

Georgia Harrison became the first former Love Island contestant to receive an honour – and she’s loving the perks it brings.

Georgia, 31, who won Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins in 2024, was awarded an MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours last year for her work tackling image-based sexual abuse and campaigning for online safety. ‘It’s definitely nice to have some recognition,’ she tells me at the Young Chef, Young Waiter, Young Mixologist World Championship at The Chancery Rosewood hotel.

‘You get to meet other people with MBEs, which sometimes feels like you’re in a special club.’

•  Billionaire John Caudwell, 73, remains unmarried to his girlfriend of more than a decade, Modesta Vzesniauskaite, a Lithuanian Olympic cyclist 30-odd years his junior. But she’s determined to lay down roots. ‘For my 70th birthday, Modesta planted a tree for every member of the family,’ reveals the Phones4U founder, who has seven children, two with Modesta. The family are already enjoying the fruits of Modesta’s labour at Broughton Hall, his £12 million Jacobean mansion in Staffordshire. ‘The whole place really comes to life when the fruit arrives,’ he says.

•  Vic Reeves’ former comedy partner Bob Mortimer admitted last year that they had ‘drifted apart’, despite both living in Kent. Now, Reeves hopes to end this estrangement. Asked if he’d team up with Mortimer again, Vic tells me: ‘Yes, why not? I would.’ The pair created the BBC Two surrealist comedy panel show Shooting Stars, as well as Channel 4’s Vic Reeves Big Night Out. Bob now stars in Mortimer And Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, in which he’s talked candidly to fellow comedian Paul Whitehouse about his mental health struggles. There is, however, a warning from Reeves: ‘It depends what Bob wants to do. I am into neither fishing nor mental health.’

• Dame Sheila Hancock has revealed that she’s never been asked to star in a television advert again after a disastrous appearance 70 years ago. The actress played a ‘sweet, caring housewife taking some healing Lucozade to my ailing son’. Dame Sheila, 93, recalls: ‘I had to pause outside a door, smiling at bringing it to my son in bed – a singularly horrid child from the Italia Conti dance school. I did my best to smile at the bottle, open the door without dropping the tray and disguise my hatred of the child in the bed. In fact, all my friends said I didn’t succeed. The result, they suggested, was an advert that managed to suggest Lucozade was good for poisoning children.’ Dame Sheila is no stranger to hostile encounters. In 2013, her West End co-star Keeley Hawes dropped out of a production they were both starring in after reportedly clashing repeatedly with her. One source described it as a ‘battle between two divas’, with one particularly heated argument allegedly leading to an ‘arm-grabbing’ incident.

• Hollywood star Ben Affleck played a key role in Wes Streeting’s love life, it turns out. ‘You’re watching a film, and you realise that you’re not attracted to the female lead actors,’ explains the Health Secretary, 43, who came out as gay at Cambridge University. ‘I remember watching Armageddon [the 1998 disaster film] and thinking Ben Affleck is quite attractive. I remember having posters on my bedroom wall around Euro ’96, and not just thinking Michael Owen was a good footballer, but also thinking he’s quite good-looking.’

Sizzling secret life of Francis Bacon laid bare in diaries trove 

A secret cache of diaries featuring racy stories about the celebrated artist Francis Bacon has been discovered in a battered briefcase in an East End flat.

And they are to be used for a fictionalised film by Darcia Martin, a television director whose credits include the BBC’s hit Call The Midwife. ‘They are a great find,’ she says.

The diaries were written by Bacon’s friend, the late David Marrion, a longstanding barman at the Colony Club, the decadent Soho bar where the artist used to while away his days drinking champagne.

‘Bacon’s nickname for David, who was gay, was “Maid Marrion”,’ Darcia explains. ‘He was a mutual friend of Francis’s heir, fellow Eastender John Edwards, and they all spent a lot of time together. David died two years ago and, when his humble flat was cleared, his Bacon lithographs had long been sold off but a collection of diaries dating back to the 1980s was found.’

She adds: ‘The books, painstakingly written in microscopic, neat handwriting, are a fascinating window on a colourful, lost world where bitchy, boozing artists hung out with everybody from criminals to famous actors.’