Then there’s the death of Princess Margaret. Now here’s a classic litmus test of whether Britain has changed. Margaret was perhaps the least popular (and it’s a close contest) among her generation of royals. The reaction to her demise after decades of heavy drinking and sixty cigarettes a day has therefore been somewhat mixed. I get the feeling that the death of Diana exhausted any possibility of English emotion about their monarchy for at least another decade, which is why enthusiasm for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee seems so tepid. But Margaret would be a hard case in any circumstances. She was only loved by a coterie of silly upper-crust homosexuals who saw her as some campy icon of monarchy-gone-bad. One more representative tabloid recently described her thus: “She’s spoilt and ill-mannered and over the years has drunk enough whiskey to open a distillery.” Others weren’t as kind. Writing in today’s Telegraph, Kenneth Rose captured the odd mixture of intimacy and hauteur that typified Margaret. Her habit of demanding that friends or colleagues suddenly shift from treating her like a normal person to treating her like royalty was particularly obnoxious:
“Hopping back on her twig,” they called it. She came to insist that her private secretary should be a peer: first the 14th Lord Napier, then the Second Viscount Ullsworth, who had succeeded to the peerage of his great-grandfather, the ennobled Speaker Lowther. Both served her well, sometimes in difficult circumstances.
I love that English under-statement, “difficult circumstances.” I think it means she could be a complete pill.
The Dish 