EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: Downing Street WhatsApp messages at Covid inquiry alarm royal archivists over lack of written material for historians of younger members of the royal family

The glut of Downing Street WhatsApp messages during the Covid inquiry is worrying royal archivists who are concerned about the lack of written material for future historians of younger members of the royal family.

A Windsor Castle archivist whispers that as they catalog the late queen’s mountains of letters and documents, as with Prince Philip, they are reconstructing a personal history that scholars of the future can rely on.

However, she says the younger royals prefer emails to writing things down and often resort to social media (which is highly secured and encrypted).

There is no protocol for storing such material.

Suggestions to introduce one have fallen on deaf ears. Historians of the future may have a hard time.

At the farewell party on Tuesday evening for V&A chairman Sir Nicholas Coleridge, he, like a frog swallowing mosquitoes, took credit for turning the once squalid museum into something trendy.

But what about TV historian and former Labor MP Tristram Hunt, who has been director of the museum since 2017?

Isn’t he equally, if not more, responsible for any change in the V&A’s fortunes? Could Sir Nicholas be guilty of ‘eating Tristram’s sandwiches’ (that is, stealing his credit)?

Gongless Eric Idle, who laments that he’s still a ‘NoBE’, has only himself to blame, judging by his conversation with King Charles at Billy Connolly’s Scottish domain.

“He said, ‘Will you be my court jester?’” the ex-Python recalls. ‘I said, ‘Why would I want a job like that?’

Reflections, the 2021 memoir by Holly Willoughby, has been reduced in price from £20 to £8 at Foyles’ main London store. Surely not a reflection on Holly’s flight from the This Morning sofa?

Holly Willoughby pictured on ITV’s This Morning

With Tory great Sir Graham Brady and two MPs joining the Privy Council, isn’t the once prestigious body now as overcrowded as a rush hour tube?

This anachronistic group of advisors to the Sovereign requires only three members to constitute a quorate, but now has 735 members. There are so many that attendance at the king’s accession council is rationed.

In addition to senior politicians, judges and archbishops, it has become an unofficial gong for the prime minister. A veteran State Councilor whines: ‘It’s easier to join the Council than to get a table at the Wolseley in Mayfair!’

The collected letters of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney tell of his conversation with Prince Philip at the state banquet in Dublin Castle on the occasion of the Queen’s visit to Ireland in 2011: ‘Philip appears to belong to the tribe that thinks Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare .’

And how did Famous Seamus describe the historic dinner? “Lizzie’s food.”

Sooty And Sweep producer Trevor Hill, who has died aged 98, banned the single glove puppet Sooty from having a girlfriend in 1965 in case it offended a largely Sabbath-keeping audience. When he relented and introduced Soo the panda as his lover, BBC Governor Dame Anne Godwin cried: ‘We can’t have sex with Sooty!’