Craig Brown - Ma’am Darling - 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret

Yoo-hoo!

Coo-EEEE!

She shows up without warning, popping her head around the door of every other memoir, biography and diary written in the second half of the twentieth century. Everyone seems to have met her at least once or twice, even those who did their best to avoid her.

I first noticed her ubiquity when I was researching another book. Wherever I looked, up she popped. Can you spot her here, in the index to Andy Warhol’s diaries?

Mansfield, Jayne

Manson, Charles

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong, Mrs see Chiang Ching

Mapplethorpe, Robert

Marciano, Sal

Marcos, Ferdinand

Marcos, Imelda

Marcovicci, Andrea

Marcus, Stanley

Margaret, Princess

Marianne ( Interview staff)

Marilyn (Boy George’s friend)

Or here, in the diaries of Richard Crossman?

Malta, withdrawal from

Management Committee

Manchester water supply

Manchester Junior Chamber of Commerce

Margach, James

Margaret, Princess

Marina, Princess

Marquand, David

Marre, Sir Alan

Marriott, Peter

It is like playing ‘Where’s Wally?’, or staring at clouds in search of a face. Leave it long enough, and she’ll be there, rubbing shoulders with philosophers, film stars, novelists, politicians.

I spy with my little eye, something beginning with M!

Here she is, sitting above Marie Antoinette in Margaret Drabble’s biography of Angus Wilson:

Maraini, Dacia

Marchant, Bill (Sir Herbert)

Maresfield Park

Margaret, Princess

Marie Antoinette

Market Harborough

And here, in the diaries of Kenneth Williams:

Manson, Charles

March, David

March, Elspeth

Margaret, Princess

Margate

Margolyes, Miriam

Would she rather have been sandwiched for eternity between Maresfield Park and Marie Antoinette, or Elspeth March and Margate? I’d guess the latter was more her cup of tea, though as luck would have it, there is a Princess Margaret Avenue in Margate, *named in celebration of her birth in 1930, so, like it or not, her name, rendered both topographical and tongue-twisting, will be forever linked to Margate.

Why is she in all these diaries and memoirs? What is she doing there? In terms of sheer quantity, she could never hope to compete with her sister, HM Queen Elizabeth II, who for getting on for a century of brief encounters (‘Where have you come from?’ ‘How long have you been waiting?’) must surely have met more people than anyone else who ever lived. Yet, miraculously, the Queen has managed to avoid saying anything striking or memorable to anyone. This is an achievement, not a failing: it was her duty and destiny to be dull, to be as useful and undemonstrative as a postage stamp, her life dedicated to the near-impossible task of saying nothing of interest. Once, when Gore Vidal was gossiping with Princess Margaret, he told her that Jackie Kennedy had found the Queen ‘pretty heavy going’.

‘But that’s what she’s there for,’ explained the Princess.

*At present the headquarters of the mobile hairdresser ‘Haircare at Home by Sharon’. As it happens, HRH Princess Margaret was fond of visiting her own hairdresser, almost to the point of addiction, often popping in twice in one day.

In her distrust of the unexpected, the Queen has taken a leaf from her grandfather’s book. King George V liked only what was predictable, regarding everything else as an infernal nuisance. A typical diary entry begins with an account of the weather (‘a nice bright morning, but strong wind’), accompanied, where appropriate, by a frost report (‘seven degrees frost this morning’). It then chronicles the exact time he had breakfast (‘up at 6.45, breakfast at eight with May’), and briefly mentions anyone notable he has encountered, and any advances he has made with his 325 stamp albums (‘The Prime Minister came to see me and we had a long talk. Spent the afternoon with Bacon choosing more stamps’). And that’s it. He disdains any sort of detail, telling or otherwise, about people and places. World events play second fiddle to stamps, clocks, barometers and bedtime. ‘The poor archduke and his wife were assassinated this morning in Serbia. They were in a motorcar. Terrible shock for the Emperor …’ he writes on the evening of 28 June 1914. He then adds: ‘Stamps after lunch, bed at 11.30.’

Few people have ever transcribed a conversation with his eldest granddaughter. Some remember what they said to the Queen, but have no memory of what she said to them, or indeed if she said anything at all. Gyles Brandreth is one of the few exceptions. At a drinks party in 1990, he found himself alone with her in a corner of the room. ‘There was no obvious means of escape for either of us, and neither of us could think of anything very interesting to say.’

But he didn’t leave it there. When he got home, he recorded their exchange in his diary:

GB (GETTING THE BALL ROLLING): Had a busy day, Ma’am?

HM (WITH A SMALL SIGH): Yes, very.

GB: At the Palace?

HM (SUCKING IN HER LIPS): Yes.

GB: A lot of visitors?

HM (APPARENTLY BITING THE INSIDE OF HER LOWER LIP): Yes.

(PAUSE)

GB (BRIGHTLY): The Prime Minister? (John Major)

HM: Yes.

(PAUSE)

GB: He’s very nice.

HM (NODDING): Yes, very.

(LONG PAUSE)

GB (STRUGGLING): The recession’s bad.

HM (LOOKING GRAVE): Yes.

GB (TRYING TO JOLLY THINGS ALONG): I think this must be my third recession.

HM (NODDING): We do seem to get them every few years … and none of my governments seems to know what to do about them.

(A MOMENT OF TINKLY LAUGHTER FROM HM, A HUGE GUFFAW FROM GB, THEN TOTAL SILENCE)

GB (SUDDENLY FRANTIC): I’ve been to Wimbledon today.

HM (BRIGHTENING BRIEFLY): Oh, yes?

GB (DETERMINED): Yes.

HM: I’ve been to Wimbledon, too.

GB (NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE): Today?

HM: No.

GB (OH WELL, WE TRIED): No, of course not. (PAUSE) I wasn’t at the tennis.

HM: No?

GB: No, I was at the theatre. (LONG PAUSE) Have you been to the theatre in Wimbledon?

(PAUSE)

HM: I imagine so.

(INTERMINABLE PAUSE)

GB (A LAST, DESPERATE ATTEMPT): You know, Ma’am, my wife’s a vegetarian.

HM (WHAT WILL SHE SAY?): That must be very dull.

GB (WHAT NEXT?): And one of my daughters is a vegetarian, too.

HM (OH NO!): Oh, dear.

Her technique is to let others do the talking. Often – perhaps more often than not – the dizzying experience of talking to a stranger more instantly recognisable than your own mother, a stranger the back of whose miniaturised face you have licked countless times, is enough to start you spouting a stream of gibberish. While you do so, Her Majesty may occasionally say, ‘Oh, really?’ or ‘That must be interesting,’ but most of the time she says nothing at all.

As a drama student in the mid-seventies, I found myself presented to her at a party, quite unexpectedly. Our host – who later explained that he thought she might want to meet one of the younger generation – told Her Majesty that I had recently had an article published in Punch , and then left us to it. ‘That must be interesting,’ she said. This was more than enough to convince me of her thirst to know more. Within seconds I was regaling her with my various complex and no doubt impenetrable theories of humour, while every now and then she was urging me on with an ‘Oh, really?’ or a ‘That must be interesting,’ and from there I proceeded to remind her of Bertolt Brecht’s theories of alienation (‘Oh, really?’), with particular reference to their application to comedy (‘That must be interesting’).