Pippa Middleton is determined to make a splash at the country home she and her husband, James Matthews, bought for £15 million.

I can disclose that the Princess of Wales’s sister plans to dig up the massive walled garden where the previous owner lovingly cultivated fruit and vegetables.

In its place, Pippa, 39, and investment banker Matthews, 47, want to install a huge outdoor swimming pool. At 82 ft x 19 ft, it would be more than twice the size of a typical private pool and the same size as those at her two local leisure centres in the Royal County of Berkshire.

Next to their pool, the lawn will be dug up and replaced with a tennis court.

While Catherine presides over manicured grass courts as patron of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, her sister intends to install one made of AstroTurf fake grass, ‘to enable safe playing conditions all year round’. The kitchen garden’s potting shed will be converted into changing rooms.

I disclosed in July that the couple, who married in 2017 and have three young children, had bought the 32-room Georgian mansion set in 150 acres.

They need planning permission because the walled garden and main house are Grade II-listed and lie in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and near ancient woodland.

‘Ownership of [the house] has recently changed hands and the new owner is seeking to evolve and identify a new use for the expansive walled garden site,’ their planning agent said in documents submitted to the local council just before Christmas.

‘This in turn will facilitate a significant investment in the heritage asset, securing its future for generations to enjoy. The owner has a growing young family and the proposals seek to provide a secure, private and enhanced area of residential space.’

There is already a much smaller pool in the grounds of the house, but their agent says it ‘was installed in excess of 20 years ago and is in need of significant renovation and infrastructure upgrades to bring up to modern standards’.

The house, which was the subject of a painstaking multi-million-pound restoration by its previous owner, is a short drive from the home of Pippa’s parents, Michael and Carole Middleton, in Bucklebury. Her brother, James, bought a farmhouse in the county for £1.45 million with his French wife, Alizee, last year.

Pippa and Eton-educated Matthews have plenty of spare cash for the project: they sold their home in Chelsea, West London, for £22.5 million —£5.5 million more than James spent on the five-floor townhouse (with six en-suites, a gym, underground cinema and staff room) in 2014.

(Very) modern manners   

It's hard to go out for a meal these days without plates of food being shared among friends.

And Richard E. Grant has had his fill of the trend. ‘I will never eat off somebody else’s plate,’ sniffs the Withnail And I star, 65. ‘If somebody takes stuff off my plate it drives me potty. It’s not about money. If somebody wants two French fries off my steak and chips, I will order them another plate so they can just have those two.’

Asked what he does at Chinese restaurants, he replies: ‘Don’t go to them’ because of ‘that, and the fact that they have the worst lighting of any restaurants’. He explains: ‘It’s always fluorescent or so brightly lit. And if you’re over 40, it’s brutal. So I won’t go.’

Is Rolling Stone Ronnie’s boy ready to settle down?

Ronnie Wood's son Tyrone, whose ex-girlfriends include pop singer Rita Ora and models Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Daisy Lowe, may be finally settling down as he approaches his milestone 40th birthday.

I hear the Mayfair art gallery owner is going out with American businesswoman Faye Harris, co-founder of ‘genderless’ perfume company Eauso Vert.

And the relationship is getting so serious that he invited her to spend Christmas with him at the Northamptonshire home of his mother, former Strictly star Jo Wood, ex-wife of Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie.

In this picture shared by Jo, Ty is wearing an apron as he serves a festive feast while Faye enjoys a cocktail. ‘Thank you for a fun Christmas Day,’ Jo tells Harris online.

How has your year been? Hopefully, less eventful than TV personality Gizzi Erskine’s. In a message to fans, the daughter of the 2nd Lord Erskine of Rerrick says 2022 involved her consuming vast numbers of hallucinogenic ‘magic’ mushrooms and quitting her restaurant business in Margate, Kent.

‘I had a lot of therapy and saw a shamen, did a lot of mushrooms and embraced shedding the chaos I found myself living in,’ the Cook Yourself Thin author says.

‘While I am a good creative, I suck at business. I am hot‑headed, frustrated that no one really cares about the details like I do.’

Happy New Year!

Creative rift sees Bohemian Boynton ditch Faithfull film 

Bohemian Rhapsody star Lucy Boynton said she was ‘thrilled’ to have been given the seal of approval by Marianne Faithfull to play the Swinging Sixties icon in the biopic Faithfull.

But I hear that journalist’s daughter Boynton has dramatically pulled out of the eagerly anticipated film.

A source tells me: ‘There were some creative differences and, on top of that, her schedule became overloaded.’

The 28-year-old actress had already begun rehearsing Faithfull’s catalogue of songs, explaining: ‘I keep practising them just in case. It’s definitely a challenge that I’m excited to take on.’

It remains to be seen if the film will go ahead with a different actress playing Sir Mick Jagger’s muse, 76, who moved into a care home earlier this year after suffering multiple health problems.

Macca’s fab night out – at the panto

In the course of his 80 years, he’s amassed an £865 million fortune and bagged a knighthood.

But Sir Paul McCartney has lost none of his joy in life’s simpler pleasures. As a Christmas treat he popped into the London Palladium to see Dawn French and Julian Clary in Jack And The Beanstalk.

‘He had lots of his family, including grandchildren, with him,’ an awestruck member of the audience tells me. ‘He was having a laugh, looking really good, on top form.’

The stage boasted a big, inflatable beanstalk, but I’m assured that Macca resisted the urge to climb it and belt out Lucy In The Sky.

Fresh out of drama school, Christian Roberts found himself starring alongside Sidney Poitier in the classic To Sir, With Love. Boyish good looks ensured that Roberts, who has died aged 78, went on to further success alongside the likes of Bette Davis.

The uncle of historian Lord (Andrew) Roberts, he also created acclaimed restaurant the Lone Star in Barbados. Death Wish director Michael Winner declared it a favourite spot, despite an inauspicious first visit.

‘A drowned man lay dead on the beach when I arrived,’ he wrote. ‘I wondered if he’d run up a big bill, didn’t pay and was left as a warning to other diners.’

He carries out missions on His Majesty’s Secret Service, but James Bond appears to beguile His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs.

I can reveal the producers of the 007 films, Eon Productions, were handed an astonishing £52 million tax break last year, during which the latest film, No Time To Die, was released.

Accounts published this week disclose the tax giveaway in 2021 included £39.4 million in ‘enhanced losses from film tax credits’, as well as £12.5 million booked against ‘the difference between the rate of corporation tax and the rate of relief under film tax credit’.

It turned a £48.9 million loss into a £2.4 million profit. The company’s directors, who included Barbara Broccoli and Michael G.Wilson, were paid a combined total of £3.4 million.

Princess Anne’s Christmas card from the heart   

Looking back over a year as it reaches its final hours is often a bracing experience — perhaps never more so than in 2022, with its merry-go-round of Prime Ministers and, above all, the death of a much-loved monarch after a mammoth 70-year reign.

Little wonder that Princess Anne decided to encapsulate the end of an era — and suggest something of her personal loss — in her choice of Christmas card.

It shows her, and her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, gazing at a portrait of her mother, Queen Elizabeth, which hangs in the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace.

Painted when Her Majesty was 87, it was the first of three portraits of the Queen by Nicky Philipps. The commission, from the Royal Mail, was to paint a head-and-shoulders portrait, but the artist got ‘carried away and made it full-length, then added the corgis’.

Philipps tells me: ‘Queen Elizabeth was obliging, curious, extremely knowledgeable and very funny, and I enjoyed every minute of it.’

Jeremy Clarkson named his Oxfordshire farm Diddly Squat because ‘that’s how much you make from farming’.

Yet I can reveal that the motormouth has now turned it into a million-pound business. Accounts published this week disclose that Diddly Squat made a £200,000 profit in the year to March.

Assets stood at £1.2 million, although that was offset by £971,000 in bills, leaving £211,000 in capital and reserves.

Staff numbers increased from six to 17 during the year at the company, Curdle Hill Farm Ltd, which operates his Diddly Squat shop. Set up in 2020, its nature of business is reported as ‘retail sale of fruit and vegetables in specialised stores’.

Since Amazon Prime started broadcasting Clarkson’s Farm, about his efforts at Diddly Squat, the shop has become hugely popular with visiting fans, but less so with some neighbours who complain about the increase in traffic.