EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: Lord Alli sponsoring a princess would have been a lot pricier

Lord Alli should think himself lucky that he got away with only paying out £5,000 to provide Lady Starmer with a personal shopper and some glad rags. Sponsoring a princess would have been a lot pricier.

Meghan Sussex is reported to have spent £116,000 on outfits for her trip to Nigeria earlier this year.

Research for her clothes spending in 2022 showed she splashed out an estimated £94,796.

However, according to 1994 Duchy of Cornwall accounts, Princess Diana spent £91,330 on clothes, £9,350 on hairdressing, £22,214 for beauty treatments and £7,306 on 'alternative therapies'. Adjusted for inflation , it dwarfs Meghan's expenditure.

PM's salary has not kept up with inflation News that Sue Gray, Sir Keir Starmer's Downing Street enforcer, is paid £3,000 more than her boss raises eyebrows.

But Sir Freebie might be aggrieved that he is on a paltry £166,786. The PM's salary was set at £10,000 by the 1937 Ministers of the Crown Act.

If that had kept pace with inflation, Starmer would be on a handy £572,432. Enough, surely, to pay for spectacles and Arsenal tickets!

Lily and her husband distracted at the theatre When Lily Allen and her husband David Harbour went to The Lehman Trilogy at the National Theatre they left before it was over.

'It's a very long play in three parts,' recalls Lily. 'I think it was in the first bit of the play, the first third, David grabbed my hand and started, like, stroking it. It was the most intense thing. I was, like, very English, "Ooh, my goodness, this person likes me – they want to be intimate with me".'

With an opportunity to see the rest of the play this month when it returns to the NT, should Lily ask David to wear boxing gloves?

A.N Wilson wishes for JK Rowling Oxonian A.N. Wilson laments the calibre of candidates for next month's vote to elect a chancellor, describing the likes of William Hague, Peter Mandelson and Imran Khan as 'entirely lacking magic'.

'It will lower the tone to elect some pushy, second-rate chancer – and that is what all the available candidates most inescapably are,' he rages, adding wistfully: 'If only JK Rowling had stood!'

Biographer Roger Lewis: 'I live off an overdraft' Biographer Roger Lewis wails that he can't make a living as a writer.

Despite rave reviews for his Taylor-Burton book, Erotic Vagrancy, it sold only 4,277 in North America – one per 78,000 people.

He moans: 'I grow increasingly bitter and unhinged, and live off an overdraft in the Hastings slum district. I don't have a pot to piddle in nor an unmortgaged window to chuck it out of.'

Cheer up, Rog. At least you're by the seaside!

Prince Andrew's plans to revamp Royal Lodge Nicholas Coleridge's book The Glossy Years recalls a chat with Prince Andrew about revamping Royal Lodge.

Andrew said: 'I'm stripping out the old rose garden and replacing it with a pitch-and-putt golf course. And installing a bowling alley.'

No planning application so far, but with little else to do, why doesn't he go the whole hog and add a roller-coaster and dodgems and turn it into AndrewWorld, Windsor's equivalent of Disney?