Princess Pushy, Jilly Cooper and a 30-year spat over 30 pieces of silver
How novelist’s waspish royal interview sparked a bitter rift that’s never healed
IT reads like the sub-plot of a novel she could have written. The storyline involves best-selling author Jilly Cooper, a glamorous royal outsider, a decades-long quarrel... and 30 pieces of silver.
And it is the fascinating tale of how a ‘glorious, beautiful, lovely’ friendship was ended by a few ill-chosen words and a joke that misfired badly. As a result, Princess Michael of Kent earned the nickname Princess Pushy – and has refused to speak to Mrs Cooper for more than 30 years.
Speaking this week about the ‘froideur’ – she insists feud is too strong a word – Mrs Cooper, 79, regretted the loss of her royal friend but admitted: ‘I’m not sure that I blame her.’
So what could have caused such a chasm between the author of Riders and other bonkbusters and the woman she once described as ‘one of the most beautiful women one would ever see’? In 1986 Mrs Cooper was sent by the Mail on Sunday to interview the exotic Marie Christine, wife of the Queen’s first cousin, Prince Michael of Kent. The couple, who married in 1978, have often bemoaned their ‘poverty’ and once said they would go anywhere for a hot meal, do not receive any funding from the Queen or state and have had to make their own way in the world.
As a result, the princess was about to publish her first book, a marginally racy account of royal ladies through history such as Catherine The Great and Marie Antoinette. Mrs Cooper went to see her at the couple’s Kensington Palace apartment. Her subsequent two-page article was overwhelmingly, gushingly complimentary.
She wrote how they sipped iced tea flavoured with cinnamon in the rosescented garden as the princess’s cats ‘peered out of the lush green foliage like a Rousseau painting’. In prose familiar to her legions of readers, Mrs Cooper described the princess, then 41, as: ‘Five foot eleven, with strong Slav features, huge slanting sage-green eyes and thick streaked blonde hair curling to her shoulders like Charles I.’
But the interviewer did not shy away from painting Marie Christine as someone who had ‘never really fitted into the English royal mould’ (too smart, too witty, too dazzlingly theatrical, too tall, she said). The headline described the subject as ‘The pushy Princess’ – a moniker that has stuck with her to this day – and Her Insecure Royal Highness. It also accused her of being ‘very manipulative’ – although Miss Cooper insists she actually wrote ‘occasionally’ – and sometimes reckless.
They were descriptions, it seems, Princess Michael didn’t much like. A few weeks later a package from Kensington Palace arrived at the home Miss Cooper shared with her husband Leo. It contained 30 silver coins – a reference to the price for which Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus. Mrs Cooper recalls: ‘We came back from our silver wedding [anniversary holiday] and we found this envelope. I thought, “Oh lovely, a silver wedding present” [but] Leo went downstairs and counted it and said, “Thirty pieces of silver”.’
Mr Cooper, who died in 2013, had a mischievous sense of humour. He put the money on a horse – Native Ruler, ridden by Pat Eddery – which ‘romped home’, Mrs Cooper says. He put the winnings in an envelope and sent them to Princess Michael with the message: ‘I read in the papers that you were short of cash, so thought this might help.’
Unsurprisingly, Mrs Cooper sighs, she has not heard a word from the princess since. She recalls: ‘We were great friends, I loved her to bits. It wasn’t me who sent the money. It was Leo. He was a great joker and thought it was hysterical. I’m too soppy, I wouldn’t dream of doing that to anybody.’
Although she still believes her interview was ‘affectionate’, Mrs Cooper understands why the princess was annoyed.
‘It was a very gentle piece [but] it was definitely flammed up,’ she says. ‘I can understand why she was upset. It was perfectly reasonable for her to be upset. But it’s sad, though, because she is lovely and fun and beautiful… but sadly it was the end of a beautiful friendship.’