EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: Who’s really the hair to the throne? 

King Charles’s full head of hair on new coins and stamps belies HM’s sensitivity about his sparsely populated pate. Ditto the coin marking his 70th birthday in 2018. 

Is it a royal trait? A coin produced by the Royal Mint to mark William’s 40th birthday in June gives him a long-departed wavy fringe. In 2018 he had a £180 buzzcut from Kate’s hairdresser Richard Ward, apparently fed-up at the ribbing from brother Harry over his lack of hair. Alas for Harry, he has his own looming baldness, telling a competitor at the Invictus Games this year that his ginger thatch is ‘doomed’.

King Charles’s full head of hair on new coins and stamps belies HM’s sensitivity about his sparsely populated pate

The future of Charles’s properties in Transylvania, bought by the Duchy of Cornwall to help him preserve the traditional lives of the peasantry, remains up in the air. They are now owned by William who inherits the duchy and is less keen on maintaining the rural idyll. Charles is unlikely to find time to indulge his annual week’s retreat there. Does that come as a relief to Camilla who has joined him only once in the Land of the Vampires? She remains unimpressed by her husband’s boast that, as he is descended from Vlad the Impaler, he has a stake in the country.

William raised a few eyebrows at the Science Museum, praising his dad, the Queen and Prince Philip for instilling in him a love of nature. Last year at Glasgow’s Cop26 climate summit the Queen waxed lyrical about Philip’s green credentials, making no mention of how she watched him shoot a tiger in India in 1961 and witnessed him kill a crocodile, stags, boar, rabbits and many of the estimated 30,000 pheasants he brought down during his shooting career. A neat swerve of royal reinvention, William?

Further humiliation for This Morning presenter Phillip Schofield, pictured, in the wake of losing his £1million We Buy Any Car promotion. 

His £20 tome Life’s What You Make It is on sale at discount shop The Works for £1. 

Don’t all rush!

Is the King in the British Library’s bad books for not sending it a copy of his £250 two-volume collected speeches? It’s a legal requirement that UK publishers dispatch a copy of every book to the Library and it is now six years since HM’s tome appeared. Which might be just as well, given that as Prince of Wales he derided the library as ‘a dim collection of sheds groping for some symbolic significance’.

South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa will be accompanied by his wife Tshepo Motsepe on his state visit next month, proving easier to handle diplomatically than his predecessor Jacob Zuma who visited in 2010. 

Zuma had three wives and wanted to bring them all to Buckingham Palace. He finally agreed to bring one and opted for Thobeka, whom he married just two months before the visit.

Androgynous warbler Marc Almond seems smitten by his pet jackdaw Dawkins, saying she is ‘fascinating, rewarding, entertaining and brilliant’, adding: ‘She can turn on the television.’ Fancy!