Backstairs Billy and his royal lament

Exactly five years ago today with the death of the Queen Mother, the gilded world of William Tallon came to a crashing halt.

After 50 years of unbroken royal service, there were many who feared for the welfare of her quaintly titled Page of the Backstairs as he adjusted to life outside palace walls.

Yet incredibly the man affectionately known as “Backstairs Billy” took to his new circumstances with unexpected vitality.

In no time he became a familiar figure at theatrical first nights, society parties and elegant soirees, often to be found on the arm of aged dowagers with his bouffant hair always neatly combed.

But today I can reveal the sadness that lies within Backstairs Billy, now 70. It is centred on his old lodgings, the tiny grace-and-favour cottage, close to Clarence House, the Queen Mother’s home and now the grand London residence of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall.

Soon after the Queen Mother’s death, Tallon was told to pack his bags and leave Gate House Lodge, in which he had lovingly created a miniature version of his royal boss’s home.

It was, he was told, to be converted into a ticket office for Clarence House when it opened its doors to the public after a lavish refit.

But no conversion took place and the house remains empty. At a party the other night, Tallon remarked sadly to a friend: “Every time I walk past that place I have a tear in my eye.”

Friends say although Prince Charles provided a Duchy of Cornwall flat for the old retainer, Tallon was “thrown out with indecent haste”.

Yet for Billy, whose life revolved around service and duty, there was another blow. He was turned down as a guide for Clarence House - no living person, he reasoned, knew the place better - in a bid to reconnect himself to the royal world he loved.

And now, I can reveal, he has suffered a further blow. For just like Clarence House, the Castle of Mey, the Queen Mother’s Scottish home-from-home in Caithness, has also undergone a makeover and is admitting tourists.

Once again Tallon applied to be a guide, but according to one close friend: “Billy didn’t even receive a reply.”

Says the friend: “After all his years of service, it’s such a shame. Billy has been so loyal to the Royal Family.”

Buckingham Palace says “no decision” has been taken about the future of the Gate House Lodge. I am told: “The property needs repairs and the refurbishment will be at some financial cost for which there are no plans at the moment.”

Birgit’s fiction beats reality

Riches-to-rags socialite Birgit Cunningham is penning a racy novel based upon the years she spent living the It-girl life in Los Angeles during the Nineties.

A former lover of Hollywood star Kevin Costner and a one-time housemate of Elizabeth Hurley, single mother Birgit, 41, is already in talks with celebrated literary agent Ed Victor about selling the roman a clef, which is amusingly titled Contains Sex, Drugs And Bad Language.

“I would get sued if I used real names so they will be changed,” says Roedean-educated Birgit when I run into her and Ed (pictured) at a West End party this week.

“I had some pretty wild times living out there and it will be a fun guessing game for people to work out who is really who in the book.”

One person who is unlikely to be be immortalised in fiction, however, is debonair man-about-town Harry Nuttall, the father of Birgit’s four-year-old son Jack.

She was recently charged with assaulting Nuttall - son of Bahamas-based baronet Sir Nicholas Nuttall - after kneeing him in the groin when she lost her court battle to get him to increase his £5-a-week child support payments.

“I’m never going to contact Harry again,” she tells me. “I want to draw a line underneath the whole horrific experience.”

Not such an easy ride for Amanda

Wearing a stunning Ashley Isham gown, perky actress Amanda Holden was a picture of elegance at the British Book Awards in London this week.

But her poised entrance to the ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel was in stark contrast to her unsure guidance

of a tandem in Kensington Gardens a day earlier.

Amanda, 36, and nearly forgotten pop star Suzanne Shaw were spotted wobbling about on a bicycle made for two as they sped around the manicured gardens of The Orangery during a charity event.

“They sent walkers scattering and seemed unable to find the brakes,” an onlooker tells me. The girls eventually flopped unceremoniously into a flowerbed.

Amanda, however, had recovered sufficiently by the time she gave a gong to novelist Lori Lansens for The Girls, a heart-warming story about conjoined twins. “It was my favourite read,” she trilled.

Are there no royal secrets safe from former palace flunky Paul Burrell?

While promoting his latest product - a furniture range which includes “the Kensington bed” - Burrell revealed that the Queen is most particular about her teapot and forbids anyone from washing it up.

According to the butler turned star of reality TV, the Queen takes tea from an 18th-century, silver Georgian teapot, which she uses to make her own cuppa at 5pm every day.

“It’s completely black on the inside,” says Burrell, who spent 11 years as a footman at Buckingham Palace before working for Princess Diana. She prefers it that way, he says, because washing it would impair the tea’s flavour.

Well-refreshed actor Gerard Depardieu has weighed in with his own personal take on the size-zero debate.

The portly Frenchman, who can imbibe up to eight bottles of wine a day, says women who abstain from the delights of eating and drinking are fundamentally unattractive.

“I couldn’t really accept a teetotal woman, in the same way that I couldn’t accept a woman who doesn’t eat,” he tells The Spectator.

“It is so pretty to eat and drink: there is such elegance in those acts.”

Red-faced Treasury aide Mark Neale, who let slip that 5.3 million families would lose out from the supposedly tax-cutting Budget, was absent from his master’s side as Gordon Brown faced a third day of grilling from the Treasury select committee.

It prompted Tory grandee Michael Fallon to inquire if the Chancellor - famously labelled a Stalinist by a former top civil servant - had “purged” his top lieutenant.

Ignoring the joke, the po-faced Chancellor said Neale had “a very important job at the Treasury”.

In a rare appearance in the Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was an articulate opponent of the Gambling Bill, but his intervention earned a sneaky back-handed compliment from Government peers.

Deputy chief whip Lord Davies of Oldham said he was “grateful” for the Primate’s contribution, before adding how he wished “he was able to be with us more often”.