Princess Uppity

Princess Margaret was everywhere on the bohemian scene of the 1960s and 1970s. She hung out with all the famous rock stars, actors and other arty types of the day. Marlon Brando was struck dumb; Picasso wanted to marry her. As Craig Brown puts it artfully: ‘Everyone seems to have met her at least once or twice, even those who did their best to avoid her.’ And so, having noticed her ubiquity in the indices of other books, the satirist has written a hugely entertaining sort-of-biography.

Why would anyone do their best to avoid the princess? Well, she had a Prince Philip-ish way with the rude put down. (On being presented with a dish of Coronation Chicken: ‘This looks like sick.’) Secondly, the drunker she got, the more she pulled rank, leading to many a nightmarish dinner. And there was not much else for her to do but get drunk.

This is a darkly glamorous tale, after all, of a ‘punishing schedule of drinking and smoking’, punctuated by notorious love affairs. The first, with Group Captain Peter Townsend, is genuinely sad: first he is shunted off to Belgium by the establishment so they can’t see each other, and then she eventually renounces him rather than be forced to give up her title and go into exile abroad. The second, with the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, later to become Lord Snowdon — immortalised here as ‘Tony Snapshot’, the bitchy name bestowed on him early on by the Earl of Leicester — ends in mutual contempt.

The book is brilliantly written, with a wonderful sardonic edge but also a thoughtful, at times even moving tone. Brown’s aleatory structure, hopping back and forth through time to present tableaux and anecdotes from the life, is a triumph, and renders the book probably the least boring royal biography it is possible to imagine reading.