Book of the week Ma’am Darling
by Craig Brown Fourth Estate 432pp £16.99 The Week Bookshop £14.99
Princess Margaret, the subject of Craig Brown’s unconventional biography, was a “pretty ghastly human being”, said Richard Morrison in The Times. Born in 1930, she was sustained all her life (she died in 2002) by an “alpine sense of entitlement”, and had a “talent bordering on genius” for offending people. She once asked an architect who’d been disabled since childhood: “Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and seen the way you walked?” Yet the “tiny but perfectly formed” princess was worshipped by “numberless” men: John Betjeman, Philip Larkin, Jeremy Thorpe and John Fowles were all “besotted”; Pablo Picasso boasted of having sexual fantasies involving “her and her sister”. Brown, it turns out, is also one of the vast “regiment of Margaret obsessives”. His Ma’am Darling is consistently entertaining, and contains some jawdropping moments – such as when he speculates about whether one of Margaret’s “presumed shags, the violent criminal John Bindon, really could balance five beer mugs on his erect penis”.
Ma’am Darling (subtitled 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret) is described by its publisher as “kaleidoscopic”, said Rachel Cooke in The Observer. This doesn’t do it justice: it is really “a cubist book, a collection of acute angles through which you can see its subject anew”. Brown’s “glimpses” comprise essays, lists, palace announcements and newspaper cuttings, as well as parodies (in one, “Queen Margaret” gives her Christmas broadcast to the nation, declaring: “My own year has been faintly tiresome... If I see one more plate of coronation chicken, I shall be left with no choice but to scream.” Through this brilliant multi-angled portrait, Brown conjures up Margaret in “all her dubious glory”, revealing the “utter rottenness of her character” while acknowledging her unmistakable allure.
This book isn’t “entirely a hatchet job”, said Lewis Jones in The Daily Telegraph. Brown is “sympathetic” on the matter of Margaret’s lack of employment and her “unhappy love life”. He “rehearses” the story of her doomed romances: her engagement to the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend; her infidelity-filled marriage to Antony Armstrong-jones (later the Earl of Snowdon). As you’d expect, Brown offers plenty of “sharp authorial observations”, and his portrait is “richly detailed”, said Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times. Nonetheless, by the end of Ma’am Darling, “Princess Margaret still doesn’t seem that interesting: just rude, arrogant, spoilt and rather unhappy”.