Kate Middleton and Prince William are widely expected to announce their engagement in 2007. Patrick Jephson, who was Diana’s private secretary, says there is much the original ‘People’s Princess’ could tell the next queen-in-waiting‘Perhaps Miss Middleton ... will be our future queen,’ I speculated in a Sunday newspaper nearly three years ago. The editor was more cautious. ‘More likely, she will not,’ he made me add.

Charles Moore pays tribute to his friend Frank Johnson, editor of The Spectator 1995–99, who died on 15 December: a man of awesome learning — and light touch‘In the Fifties, job advertisements used to read “smart boy wanted”. That’s me,’ Frank Johnson would say. The joke tells you a good deal about Frank.First, it places him in his social milieu. He was an upper-working-class East End boy born during the war. He remembered the present Queen’s Coronation, with everyone crowding into his parents’ front-room to join in the first mass televisual occasion in British history.