Living off a Lord's lunch, Telly vet, Naked ambition, Poor old Prince

How unfortunate that the Government's latest initiative on pensions should have looked for support from Tony Blair's mate, Lord 'Charlie' Falconer, who promptly upset us old 'uns by saying he could live on £93.33 a week. What nonsense.

But then you can always rely on politicians to put their feet in it. Years ago the Tory grandee RA Butler suggested we were all dining on pheasant and port wine while Lady Thatcher's pal Keith Joseph thought the working class should be limited to two children per family.

Lord Falconer, Minister of State at the Cabinet Office, was speaking on a visit to a day centre in Southampton, where pensioner Grace Allen challenged him to live on her pension. In fact, she gets well above the basic £66.75 a week as she suffers from crippling arthritis.

The millionaire lawyer, who has put on two stone since joining the Cabinet, once shared a flat with Tony Blair. His lordship likes to eat at a Covent Garden restaurant where lunch for two comes out at about £80.

Our own Lord Bassam, in Brighton on the same mission as Lord Falconer, handled matters far more sensitively when I joined him at the Age Concern HQ in Ditchling Road to spread the word that pensioners were not claiming all the benefits due to them.

Old timers gathered there welcomed news of a minimum income guarantee which would give the poorest up to £15 a week in supplementary benefits. From April next year they still qualify, even if they have savings between £6,000 and £12,000.

Some 500,000 pensioners will benefit and the extra money comes on top of the £150 winter fuel allowance and free TV licences for the over-75s.

All very well, but Steve Bassam was told in no uncertain terms that pensioners want a substantial increase all round. They feel insulted by this month's increase of 73p weekly.

Steve took note of what people were saying, though he pointed out the Government was spending an extra £6.5 billion on pensioners in this Parliament and he reckoned the average pensioner will be £400 a year better off.

A free helpline has been set up for pensioners who think they are missing out and want to lodge a claim. Call 0800 0281111.

Telly vet's in new practice

Pleased to see my friend Christopher Timothy is out of the wilderness and returning to our screens in a new BBC1 series called Doctors. He plays senior partner in a group practice.

Little work has come his way since he portrayed vet James Herriot in 90 episodes of All Creatures Great and Small. As well as being typecast, his popularity dropped like a stone in 1978 when he walked out on his wife Sue and their six children.

He had fallen for his co-star Carol Drinkwater, though that relationship also crashed. Christopher now has a second wife, Annie. They live with their 16-year-old daughter Grace outside Chichester.

Christopher is a legendary figure among my tribe for a strange reason - he did even more than Page 3 girls to wake up the nation to the soaraway Sun, though he didn't know it at the time.

It happened this way. The new tabloid in 1969 was brash, noisy and exciting. It needed a matching voice to front the paper's endless television commercials.

Sir Larry Lamb, the paper's first editor, recalls: "We spent weeks searching for a voice that could pump out 180 breathless words a minute. Eventually we came across an unknown actor, a gangling, untidy youth in NHS spectacles. His name was Christopher Timothy."

Stars' naked ambition

The Romans wandered about wearing very little in the last days of their once mighty empire. I'm wondering whether our civilisation is going the same way.

I mean, what possesses Hollywood stars to go on stage in Britain and take their clothes off? Surely they could stay at home and bare all. For starters, it's much warmer in California.

Kathleen Turner is the latest to go nude. She plays a whole scene naked in The Graduate, which has its premiere at the Gielgud Theatre in the West End tomorrow.

Even the staid Women's Institute has got in the act. The ladies of Rylstone and District in Yorkshire, who stripped for a fund-raising calendar, are now arguing about an offer to take part in a film of their story, backed by the Walt Disney

Corporation.The Full Monty in 38D.

Lay off poor old Prince of Wales

Spare a thought for Prince Charles, who manages to get it in the neck when he hasn't said a word and probably doesn't have the faintest idea what his critics are talking about.

Like the barmy suggestion he is meddling in politics and going soft on drugs, an accusation based on the Police Foundation report last week calling for the decriminalisation of cannabis and ecstasy.

What's that got to do with Prince Charles? He's honorary president of the Foundation - and scores of other bodies - and the study was partly funded by The Prince's Trust.

On that slender evidence he's accused of poking his nose into controversial matters. It is even suggested his views are influenced by the fact his partner, Camilla Parker Bowles, is a smoker.

In the same week the Prince is ridiculed for presiding over a lunch with 22 top European chefs at a Gloucestershire farm to promote the virtues of British beef. Where did he go wrong this time? He failed to eat anything because he has given up lunch for Lent.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.