Ephraim Hardcastle
tHE late Margaret, duchess of Argyll, is the subject of the new BBC1 and Amazon Studios series A Very British Scandal – all about her 1963 divorce from the ‘bad hat’ 11th duke of Argyll – which will ‘shine a light on one of the most (unfairly) maligned women in modern history’. Margaret wasn’t averse to occasional womenmaligning herself. She insisted to me that her successor as duchess of Argyll – Mathilda Mortimer, who became the duke’s fourth wife in 1963 – was secretly his daughter, her mother, Mathilda Coster, allegedly having been his lover in Paris. A Very, Very British Scandal.
APROPOS of Margaret (played by Claire Foy, pictured, who impersonated the Queen in The Crown), she is said to have been seduced by movie star David Niven as a teenager while visiting the Isle of Wight and whisked back to London by her tycoon father, George Whigham. During her saucy divorce case – Polaroid snaps of a naked Margaret pleasuring an unnamed lover were studied – a Scottish paper mischievously published a photo of a crowd on the banks of the River Clyde behind a sign post saying ‘Queue here for the Duchess of Argyll’ – referring to a local ferry boat. dESPItE constant public criticism and a 2017 vow by then PM theresa May to get rid of automatic peerages, our convoluted honours system seems to be in no mood to reform itself. A source in Whitehall says that simplifying the system would mean honours such as the Order of the Bath, the preserve of top military brass and civil servants, would be likely to get the chop. So too would the Most distinguished Order of St Michael & St George, the customary gong of the diplomatic service. Some now believe that respect for HM is the real obstacle to reform, preferring to leave the problem for King Charles.
A N Wilson’s lamentation about the future for the Church of England after the Queen was forseen by fictional civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby in the TV comedy Yes, Prime Minister 35 years ago. ‘The Queen is inseparable from the Church of England,’ he told his PM James Hacker, who asked, ‘What about God?’ ‘I think he’s what’s called an optional extra,’ replied Sir Humphrey. Wilson says: ‘Atheism is no disqualification from belonging to the Church of England.’ Sir Humphrey said that when atheist clergy ‘stop believing in God they call themselves modernists’. tHE Prince of Wales’s forthcoming visit to Jordan will be a comfort to King Abdullah, who endures international criticism after the Pandora Papers leak that he had amassed property in the UK and US worth £70million, despite protests at home over austerity and tax hikes. By contrast, when Charles’s duchy of Cornwall uncontroversially bought Highgrove in Gloucestershire, a spokesman explained: ‘When you are 31 you want a place of your own.’ Since then he has gained Birkhall, Clarence House, dolphin House on tresco, an estate in Wales, a cottage in transylvania, free use of the Castle of Mey, dumfries House (run by his charitable trust) and will inherit Sandringham and Balmoral.
Email: peter.mckay@dailymail.co.uk