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

Sitting close to the Princess, de Villeneuve was shocked to find that her smoking was seamless. ‘When we started to eat, she lit a ciggie and then continued to chainsmoke, lighting one ciggie off another, throughout the meal. Where’s the protocol in that?’

The Princess ignored Twiggy – at that time one of the most famous women in Britain – until the very last moment. She then turned and asked her what her name was.

‘Lesley, Ma’am. But my friends call me Twiggy.’

‘How unfortunate,’ replied the Princess, and turned her back on her once more.

At this point, Lord Snowdon, never the most loyal husband, leaned over towards de Villeneuve. ‘You will get this with the upper classes,’ he sighed.

‘Well, I think it’s a charming name,’ chipped in the Marquis of Dufferin.

*Often known as ‘The Climbing Rose’.

The Princess liked to one-up. I have heard from a variety of people that she would engineer the conversation around to the subject of children’s first words, asking each of her fellow guests what their own child’s first words had been. Having listened to responses like ‘Mama’ and ‘doggy’, she would say, ‘ My boy’s first word was “ chandelier ”.’

But her strong competitive streak was not always matched by ability. A regular fellow guest recalled one particular fit of bad sportsmanship. ‘We were playing Trivial Pursuit, and the question was the name of a curried soup. She said, “It’s just called curried soup. There isn’t any other name for it. It’s curried soup!” Our host said, “No, Ma’am – the answer is ‘Mulligatawny’.” And she said, “No – it’s curried soup !” And she got so furious that she tossed the whole board in the air, sending all the pieces flying everywhere.’

Her snappiness was instinctive and unstoppable, like a nervous twitch. ‘I hear you’ve completely ruined my mother’s old home,’ she said to the architect husband of an old friend who had been working on Glamis Castle. To the same man, who had been disabled since childhood, she said, ‘Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and seen the way you walk?’ Her more sympathetic friends managed to overlook such cruel remarks, believing them to be almost involuntary, or at least misguided. ‘I think she was trying to be cheeky. She thought she was trying to reach a kind of intimacy,’ says one. ‘But she suffered from a perpetual identity crisis. She didn’t know who she was. She never knew whether she was meant to be posh or to be matey, and so she swung between the two, and it was a disaster.’

In the 1990s, two senior representatives from Sotheby’s, one tall and thin, the other rather more portly, came to Kensington Palace to assess her valuables. The Princess asked them what they thought.

‘Well –’ began the tall man.

‘No, not you – the fat one,’ snapped the Princess.

The rebuke became her calling card, like Frank Ifield’s yodel or Tommy Cooper’s fez. Who wanted to sit through her analysis of current affairs, or her views on twentieth-century literature? No one: the connoisseurs wanted to see her getting uppity; it was what she did best. If you were after perfect manners, an early night and everything running like clockwork, then her sister would oblige. But if you were in search of an amusing tale with which to entertain your friends, you’d opt for the immersive Margaret experience: a late night and a show of stroppiness, all ready to jot down in your diary the moment she left, her high-handedness transformed, as if by magic, into anecdote.

Hoity-toity is what was wanted. For most recipients, hosts and guests alike, it was part of a package deal: once she had finally gone and the dust had settled, they were left with a suitably outrageous story – the ungracious royal! the bad Princess! – to last a lifetime. She had a small circle of lifelong friends, loyal to the last. Though they forgave her faults, they also liked to store them up, ready for repetition to others less loyal. ‘Princess Margaret’s friends are devoted to her,’ wrote A.N. Wilson in 1993. ‘But one seldom meets any of them after they have had the Princess to stay, without hearing a tale of woe – how she has kept the company up until four in the morning (it is supposedly not allowed to withdraw from a room until a royal personage has done so); or insisted on winning at parlour games, even those such as Trivial Pursuit which require a degree of knowledge which she simply did not possess; how she has expected her hostess to act as a lady-in-waiting, drawing back the curtains in the morning, and so forth.’

Ever discreet, Kenneth Rose would amuse his friends with the tale of the vintage Madeira (‘Exactly like petrol!’), but would bide his time before putting it into print, for fear of losing his friendship with the Princess. His oleaginous discretion was assured, and this was how he remained a frequent visitor to Kensington Palace. This discretion extended to the moment of Princess Margaret’s death, at which point he employed the anecdote to lend spice to her obituary in the Sunday Telegraph . Her death unleashed many such tales, rising like so many phoenixes from the ashes. For instance, in a diary for the New Statesman , the comedian John Fortune recalled an encounter with her at the BBC Television Centre in the early seventies.

First, he introduced her to his producer, Denis Main Wilson. ‘She asked him what he did. He stood up very straight and said: “Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part .” The Princess replied: “Isn’t that that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?”

‘After a few more minutes of conversation, I found myself saying: “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you, Princess Margaret, but I have someone waiting for me downstairs and I have to go.”

‘She fixed me with a beady look. “No you don’t,” she said. “No one leaves my presence until I give them permission to do so.”’

But, for all her haughtiness, Fortune detected ‘a look of mischief in her eyes’. ‘At that moment, I knew she didn’t mean it. Had she, perhaps, been waiting all her life for someone to tell her they had to go?’

Fortune felt that if he had replied, ‘Well, that’s too bad, I’m off anyway,’ then nothing would have happened. But he wasn’t prepared to take the risk. A formal conversation continued for a few more minutes, and then she said, ‘I’m very bored here. Isn’t there somewhere else in this place we can go and have a drink?’

He knew of a bar in Light Entertainment that stayed open late, so he raced down two floors, only to find the barman pulling the metal grille down. ‘“Stop, stop,” I cried, “open up again. Quick, Princess Margaret is coming.”’

‘Pull the other one …’ said the sceptical barman.

At that moment they saw what Fortune described as ‘the pocket battleship’ bearing down on them.

Fortune ordered two gin and tonics, one for himself and one for Princess Margaret. He then spotted a director of The Old Grey Whistle Test slumped against the bar, so he presented him to the Princess. ‘I think he must have been Australian, because within minutes the talk was of Sydney Harbour, convicts and the penalties for stealing a loaf of bread in the eighteenth century.

‘And what made it perfect,’ enthused the Princess, not getting the point of the story, ‘was that it was STALE bread!’ Within minutes, Fortune had made his excuses and left.

Throughout her adult life, Princess Margaret was happy to be tempted away from her solid bedrock of tweedy friends towards the more glittering world of bohemia. She leaned towards the artistic, the camp and the modish, even going so far as to marry a man at the centre of that particular Venn diagram. Her royal presence was enough to gratify the snobbish tendencies of the bohemians, while her snooty behaviour let them laugh at her behind her back, thus exonerating themselves from the charge of social climbing. Hers was a name to drop, generally to the sound of a tut-tut or a titter.