Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  A couple of years later I met her at a party of Tom Stoppard’s and said hello and mentioned the lunch; she looked right through me and walked away.

  * Harris’s novel set at Bletchley Park.

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  What happened in the shower? Nobody quite knows.

  In February 1999, Princess Margaret was on Mustique. Her guests at Les Jolies Eaux were enjoying a relaxed breakfast, chatting about the day ahead. Suddenly, the cook rushed in. There was steam coming from under the bathroom door, she said: the Princess must be trapped inside. Unable to get a response from the bathroom, the Princess’s personal detective broke down the door. The Princess was badly scalded, and in shock. He carried her out.

  It seems the accident had occurred because Princess Margaret had made the easy mistake of mixing up the hand controls. There might also have been a faulty thermostat, which had heated the water to boiling point. Intending to have a lukewarm shower, the Princess turned the wrong knobs at the wrong time; jets of searingly hot water shot out straight onto her feet. She was unable to move until her rescue, perhaps five or ten minutes later. The extreme damage to her feet from scalding was probably exacerbated by a pre-existing condition called Raynaud’s disease, which affects the circulation.

  Princess Margaret had been brought up in the grin-and-bear-it school of medicine. She insisted there was nothing seriously wrong with her, no point in making a fuss, and absolutely no way in which she would be prepared to curtail her precious holiday. According to Tim Heald, ‘The Princess’s own stubbornness and famous hauteur now contributed to the severity of her illness.’

  She struggled on for several weeks on Mustique, unable and unwilling to fly to a hospital. She had to move from Les Jolies Eaux because her son David, to whom she had transferred the house ten years before, had let it out, and the new tenants were due to arrive. Eventually an American neighbour agreed to let her move to his beach cottage. Once there, she never left her room, and would only let Anne Tennant come into it, summoning her by buzzer at all times of the day and night.

  Eventually, Anne Tennant put a call through to the Queen at Balmoral, asking for help. Taking the matter in hand, the Queen organised a flight back to Britain on Concorde. Margaret then spent months convalescing at Balmoral, but still refusing the skin grafts recommended by the doctors. She did not appear in public for six months, when she opened a project for sexually abused children in Aberdeen. From now on, her walking would be restricted to just a few steps at a time.

  She gradually recovered, but kept using a wheelchair, even though her elder sister considered it unnecessary. When Margaret and her mother visited Buckingham Palace together, an unseemly scene of wheelchair wars took place. The Queen had seen to it that a footman would have a wheelchair ready for her mother, but as the lift doors opened onto the first floor, Margaret made a dash for it. ‘For God’s sake, Margaret – get out! That’s meant for Mummy!’ remarked the Queen.

  At a reception for the Queen Mother’s centenary at Windsor Castle on 21 June 2000, Princess Margaret hopped into a wheelchair that had been brushed aside by her mother. Her action was said to have left the Queen ‘fuming’. But in early January 2001, her health went rapidly downhill. A second stroke was followed by further strokes in the months to come: she lost her sight in one eye, and most of the left side of her body was paralysed. She was soon restricted to her wheelchair, and sank into a depression. Old grudges and resentments festered, and her paranoia increased. For a time she took to blaming her condition on her treatment at the hands of Lord Snowdon. Often she refused to see anybody, including her mother. She spent most of her time in bed, with the curtains drawn. ‘She often didn’t know what time it was, mistaking lunch for breakfast and that sort of thing,’ says a friend.

  (Tim Graham/Getty Images)

  Roddy Llewellyn visited, but before long she decided that she would have no more male visitors. ‘I look so awful now – I don’t want them to remember me like this,’ she told Anne Tennant. Many felt she had lost the will to live. ‘It wasn’t easy to feel sympathy,’ her old friend Prue Penn told Tim Heald. ‘She’d sit in the bedroom looking utterly miserable. The things she asked me to read … there was a Trollope. A frightfully dull book. No men came at all. She couldn’t bear to be seen by men. When she went to sleep, I stopped reading. “I’ll go, nurse,” I’d say. “She’s asleep.”

  ‘“I’m not,” she’d say.’

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  At 8 a.m. on Saturday, 9 February 2002, Alastair Campbell, the prime minister’s press secretary, was phoned by the duty clerk, Nick Matthews, to be told that Princess Margaret had died; Mr Blair was being informed, and the death would shortly be announced by Buckingham Palace. By way of conversation, Campbell reminded Matthews that it was he who had called Campbell back in 1997 to tell him of the death of Princess Diana.

  ‘That was a bit more dramatic than this one,’ replied Matthews bluntly.

  Tony Blair, who was preparing to fly to Sierra Leone, called Campbell for advice. ‘I said it was important he didn’t try too hard, or appear emotional, just say she was basically a good thing, thoughts with the Queen, Queen Mum, rest of the family, etc.’

  In his diary, Campbell recalls watching Blair on television a few hours later, broadcasting live from his plane on the way to Sierra Leone. Blair, he writes, ‘did his doorstep on Margaret’ – a doorstep, in this context, meaning a few words to the media, apparently delivered off-the-cuff.

  ‘I’m deeply saddened to hear of the death of Princess Margaret,’ said Blair. ‘My thoughts are with the Queen, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and the rest of the Royal Family at this time.’

  Campbell was not wholly convinced by this doorstep. ‘It was a bit actorish for my liking, but OK I guess. We had to watch any sense of the thing being anything like Diana.’

  The Queen’s private secretary, Robin Janvrin, called Campbell before the prime minister spoke to the Queen. Campbell agreed with Janvrin about the appropriate level of grief, and how to stage-manage it. ‘I felt the simplest thing was to make clear this was different to Diana’s death in part because it was expected. I also felt people would respond to the fact the Queen and Queen Mother would take this differently, and there was a case for them being seen fairly soon, showing she was still up and about and doing her duty, but also showing some emotion at the loss of a younger sister. She would clearly be thinking of her own mortality, not to mention her mother’s.’

  Campbell continued: ‘[Prince] Charles went to Sandringham “to comfort the Queen Mother”.’ In his diaries, he put that last phrase in inverted commas, almost as though it were unreal. Campbell hadn’t particularly liked the way Prince Charles had delivered his own television statement about the death of Princess Margaret: ‘OK, but he was not a natural presenter and he shifted around too much, creating constant distractions from what he was saying.’ Campbell seems to have seen it entirely in PR terms, the presentation of emotion being more important than the emotion itself.

  Tributes to the Princess were also delivered by the other party leaders. Like Blair, the Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith was deeply saddened: ‘I am deeply saddened by this morning’s announcement that Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret died in hospital. An active member of the royal family and a strong servant of her country, she will be sorely missed. Our deepest sympathy and condolences go to Her Majesty the Queen, the Queen Mother, and the rest of the royal family at this sad time.’

  Her old friend Lord St John of Fawsley went much further. ‘I have got wonderful memories of her,’ he said. ‘She was the most beautiful debutante of her generation and she kept that beauty right through her life. She was highly intelligent. In many ways, she was one of the most intelligent women, one of the cleverest women, I have ever met, and she never really had an outlet for that intelligence. She had a turbulent life, of course, but at the close of her life – in the last decade – she had somehow “come into port”. She was not at all unhappy. She loved her royal duties and she did them
tremendously professionally.’

  Her lifelong friends, mainly women, remembered Princess Margaret with affection. They felt she had never been given her due, and recalled private acts of great kindness. When she had heard that an acquaintance from Mustique had lost his job, his wife, his money and his home, she had asked him where he was going to live when he got back to London. He said he didn’t have a clue. She invited him to stay at Kensington Palace, and he lived there for several months, while she helped him back on his feet.

  Lady Anne Tennant looked back to the time in the late 1980s when her son Henry was first diagnosed with Aids. ‘A lot of people were frightened – they wouldn’t bring their children to stay, but she always did. And she saw Henry and hugged him. And we used to go to the Lighthouse together, long before Princess Diana did – nobody knew that. We used to talk to the young men there whose partners had died and their families wanted nothing to do with them. And she was so kind, so good. And at some point I did sort of break down, and she said, “Now, do stop crying, Anne, no crying.” She was a very, very good friend, and her kindness to Henry was extraordinary.’

  Elizabeth Cavendish also paid tribute to her kindness. ‘She was, I think, the most loyal person I have ever met and of course to me a wonderful friend. I know, or at least I think I know, that no matter what I had done she would have been there. The people who knew her best were devoted to her. It was the fringe friends who could be so unpleasant.’

  Lady Elizabeth Anson spoke of the Princess on the BBC show Breakfast with Frost. She refused to accept the way her cousin had been portrayed as a ‘troubled princess’. Far from it. ‘Of course the latter years have not been at all easy and nobody would want anybody to go through that. She was such a talented person I think in certain ways she could have carved out a musical career for herself and possibly been on the stage … It always used to irritate me that whenever there was any kind of cartoon about her she was always somehow attached to a bottle of Famous Grouse and a cigarette holder and a packet of cigarettes when in fact for many years she neither smoked nor drank. It was a very unfair thing to do to someone who couldn’t answer back in that way.’

  She would remember her, she said, as she had been when they went out to a restaurant a year previously, just before she suffered another stroke. ‘It was the first dinner she had had in many months and, I think, unfortunately the last … She looked so wonderfully beautiful. She was wearing a beautiful red-and-gold jacket and she had taken out her rubies and she did look as she did before she had her very first stroke. She was in fantastic form and that is how I would like to remember her.’

  Prince Charles, too, spoke of his ‘darling aunt’ with affection. ‘She had such a dreadful time in the last few years with her awful illness and it was hard, let alone for her to bear it, but for all of us as well. She had such a wonderfully free spirit and she absolutely loved life and lived it to the full and from that point of view it was even harder for everyone to witness this. She also had an incredible talent. I think one of the fondest memories I shall have of her was of her sitting at the piano playing away with a large, very elegant cigarette holder in her mouth.’

  ‘She had more quality than she was given credit for,’ says Hugo Vickers. ‘I always thought Snowdon’s friends were more loyal to him than hers were to her. She always came out badly. It is so easy to make her life look tragic. Perhaps on the big issues it was, but on the little issues it wasn’t at all. She was nicer than she thought she was.’

  Sir Roy Strong, a guest at so many of her dinner parties over three decades, issued no public statement, but chose to confide his misgivings to his diary, ready for publication at a later date. ‘It is a curious fact that if she had died in the middle of the 1960s, the response would have been akin to that on the death of Diana.

  ‘As it was, she lived long enough for the bitter truth about her to become general knowledge. In my case, as we passed into the 1990s, my attitude to the Royal Family changed. I was brought up in the age of deference. Now a member of the Royal Family has to earn my respect. I can’t indulge in sycophancy any more.

  ‘I decided in 1997 that I no longer cared whether I saw Princess Margaret again. A bridge had been crossed. The way she behaved by that date was so inconsiderate that I really couldn’t stand any more of it.

  ‘This was a Princess who never seemed to think of anything other than everyone’s role to fulfil her slightest whim. All of this was so sad because, when young, she had been beautiful, vivacious and at times quick-witted. But the downside won and that’s what the public in the end perceived. She was devoid of the common touch, attracting many to her circle who were sleazy glitterati and lived, it seemed, entirely for her own pleasure. The end was so tragic, a half-paralysed, bloated figure in a wheelchair but, I suppose, 50 years of cigarettes and whisky had effectively destroyed her system.’ He then added, by way of explanation, or exculpation, ‘It’s terrible to write this but there has been a need to “clear the decks”.’

  There was, said the Evening Standard, ‘a steady trickle’ of members of the public wishing to sign the books of condolence for HRH the Princess Margaret the day after her death. These books had been placed in a red-carpeted tent at St James’s Palace. One of the first in the queue was Barbara Girelli-Kent. ‘Princess Margaret was my era in the 1960s,’ she said. ‘She was symbolic of correctness and strength of character. She had a mind of her own but great respect for Her Majesty the Queen and the royal institution. She was a trouper.’

  Anthea Mander Lahr said, ‘She was a colourful character not much older than myself. She added a bit of spice to life with her scandals. It’s such a nationalistic thing to say but it gives you pride of being British.’

  John Fellowes, an Australian on holiday in London, had popped by to pay his respects. ‘To an older person it is a break with the past. I’m also reminded of what Mr Donne said many years ago – “No man is an island”. It is a changed era from when she was young and vital, and I suppose there’s not so much interest in royalty today, but I am.’

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  Within a week, the poet laureate, Andrew Motion, had composed a brand-new poem to mark the Princess’s death. He called it ‘The Younger Sister’. It reads much as though a taxi driver were holding forth to a grandee in the back of his cab: ‘The luxuries, of course, and privilege – the money, houses, holidays, the lot: all these were real, and all these drove a wedge between your life and ours.’ But when chopped up, it looks more like poetry:

  The luxuries, of course, and privilege –

  The money, houses, holidays, the lot:

  All these were real, and all these drove a wedge

  Between your life and ours.

  Motion was suggesting, of course, that money, houses, holidays – ‘the lot’ – were absent from his own particular life, and from the lives of almost everyone other than the late Princess, and that this imbalance somehow ‘drove a wedge/Between your life and ours’.

  All very well; but then the poet laureate seemed to have second thoughts:

  And yet the thought

  Of how no privilege on earth can keep

  A life from suffering in love and loss –

  This means we turn to you and see how deep

  The current runs between yourself and us.

  Thus, Motion (or ‘us’, as he styled himself) had, over the course of a couple of lines, come to feel that, when push comes to shove, we are all akin to Her Royal Highness:

  And now death spells it out again, and more,

  As it becomes your final human act:

  A daughter gone before her mother goes:

  A younger sister heading on before;

  A woman in possession of the fact

  That love and duty speak two languages.

  His effort was met with a widespread thumbs-down. A.N. Wilson, never one to mince his words, criticised the poem as ‘extraordinarily impertinent’, condemning Motion as ‘a Royal Lickspittle’, and adding, ‘All he’s done as Laureate … is
to persuade me that this rather absurd position should be abolished.’ A month later, in March 2002, the left-wing poet Adrian Mitchell protested at Motion’s obsequiousness by declaring himself the ‘anti-poet laureate’, and vowing to have himself installed in the post at a ceremony in Trafalgar Square.

  After hearing of the death of Princess Margaret, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Rev George Carey, went to pay his respects. He was a devotee of all members of the Royal Family, going so far as to wonder, in his autobiography, Know the Truth, ‘if our nation [is] actually worthy of their devotion and unflagging sense of duty’. In the same work, he described Prince Andrew as ‘outgoing, direct and entertaining’, and the Duchess of York as ‘a refreshing young woman’. He also paid tribute to Prince Philip’s ‘inimitable sense of humour’, and called the then Camilla Parker-Bowles ‘a most attractive and charming person, warm-hearted and intelligent, with a down-to-earth attitude’. Above all, he claimed to have developed a ‘special friendship’ with Princess Margaret. ‘She had very firm views about religious services, and would have no truck whatsoever with “new-fangled” services, so the Book of Common Prayer rite would always be used when she was present.’

  The former archbishop recalled celebrating communion at the Princess’s bedside. ‘The effect of the steroids she had been prescribed showed in her swollen face and she was rather depressed that evening,’ he revealed, ‘but she noticeably brightened up during the simple and short service.’ Afterwards, he had anointed the Princess with olive oil his wife Eileen had brought back from Bethlehem, before decanting it into a smaller flask. After suggesting that the Princess might like to anoint herself nightly, he presented her with the flask. ‘Princess Margaret was thrilled with it.’