CRAIG BROWN: Why Princess Margaret upset high society

CRAIG BROWN: Why Princess Margaret upset high society

Gossip never dies. My biography of Princess Margaret was first published back in 2017.

Her lady-in-waiting, Lady Glenconner, disliked it so much that she was inspired to write a memoir of their friendship, which, to my mind, offered much the same portrait of a difficult and demanding woman, but from a more tolerant point of view.

Now there is a volume of diaries that portrays the Princess with greater vitriol than ever before.

The Conservative MP and louche socialite Chips Channon died 65 years ago, but only recently, with the publication of the final volume of his unexpurgated diaries, edited by Simon Heffer, has his portrait of Princess Margaret come to light.

On June 29, 1948, Channon reveals that Princess Margaret’s new nickname is ‘The Twerp’. The following month he stays with the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, and discovers that the 17-year-old Princess Margaret, who has just left, ‘bored and bullied everybody. She is a tiny tyrant and will get the Royal Family into trouble’.

Now there is a volume of diaries that portrays the Princess with greater vitriol than ever before

Like many people in high society at that time, he is obsessed by the Princess’s height, or lack of it. ‘How tiny Princess Margaret is,’ he notes.

And so it goes on. On March 19, 1952, a friend reports back to him that Princess Margaret, now aged 21, ‘is utterly exhausted, wretched and bored’.

Chips has friends in the Royal Family and they seem happy to pass on all sorts of gossip, perhaps under the misapprehension that he can keep a secret.

It is a mistake they have made before, and will make again. On February 19, 1953, the King of Greece lets him know of all the latest goings-on, having just come from dinner at the Palace.

‘. . . He dined à quatre, the Queen, Prince Philip and Princess Andrew of Greece. They were very downcast: Princess Margaret, who is pretending to be ill with gastric flu — and perhaps half is — has announced her intention of marrying Peter Townsend!

‘The Queen Mother refuses to speak to her!! . . . They have made her promise to do nothing until Queen Mary dies, lest it kill her; and, of course, they hope she will get over it.

‘The family are in despair and the drama has cast a shadow over the whole Coronation . . . The Queen Mother is to blame; she must have been aware of what was going on, since half London society knew! . . . Poor fat Queen Mum — her world is collapsing.’

For the rest of the year, Chips can’t stop going on about how awful Margaret is.

Channon wrote: ‘Princess Margaret is becoming cheap and declassee, unpopular and a bore. She goes almost anywhere with almost anyone’

At Ascot in June: ‘Princess Margaret looked dull and dowdy and cross.’ The following month, Townsend is transferred to Belgium, which ‘explains Princess Margaret’s recent rudeness and sulky manners’.

A week later, she has a cold: ‘Or is it a fit of ill temper and sulks?’

And so it continues. His diary entry for March 30, 1954, notes that: ‘Princess Margaret . . . is becoming a bore, a problem and unpopular.’

A month later, at a supper party: ‘Princess Margaret behaved tiresomely, I thought. I am very anti-her at the moment.’ You don’t say!

By now, she is a regular on the London party circuit. ‘Princess Margaret is becoming cheap and declassee, unpopular and a bore. She goes almost anywhere with almost anyone.’ In a clear case of pot and kettle, Chips complains that she is always ‘making fun of people’.

In June 1954, Princess Margaret is involved in a charity play. ‘One hears of nothing else. Princess Margaret, now known variously as “Maggot”, “Princess Midget”, “Lilliput” and “Her Royal Lowness”, is the prime mover. She . . . bullies everybody. She is beginning to get on my nerves.’

His vitriol gathers pace throughout the summer months — ‘maddening’ (June 15), ‘increasingly impossible’ (June 16), ‘increasingly unpopular’ (July 24).

At a party in October 1955: ‘Princess Margaret is strained and I wonder why they take her — does she insist on going?’

On March 19, 1952, a friend reports back to Channon that Princess Margaret, now aged 21, ‘is utterly exhausted, wretched and bored’

The following month, at a ball at the American Embassy, she is ‘as maddening as ever’.

Eighteen months later, a friend tells him that Princess Margaret ‘looked extremely bored’ at a party. She is, he observes, ‘increasingly unpopular’.

On April 15, 1957, his friend Rab Butler, the then Home Secretary, tells him that Princess Margaret ‘swears . . . and is downright and very Elizabethan in her language’.

It is to be his last diary entry. Chips Channon then suffers a series of strokes, and can write no more: bad luck on him, but a godsend for Her Royal Highness.

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