By Melanie Cable-Alexander My affair with Lord Snowdon upended my life. But for our son’s sake, I kept my pain to myself
A heartfelt warning to Prince Harry from a woman who was thrown into the royal spotlight...
EVEN now I feel a frisson of anger. The other mum had me pinned against a wall like a butterfly — at a children’s party, of all places — as she asked a series of deeply intrusive questions in front of the entire gathering. I could sense the prurient interest in every tilted head and sideways glance.
What, said the mum, could I tell her about my ‘affair’ with Lord Snowdon, ex-husband of the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret? The relationship that had produced my gorgeous son Jasper, then still tiny, and had seen me labelled a ‘harlot’ and a ‘gold digger’.
That was back in 1998, and perhaps it won’t surprise you to discover that the woman at the party was married to a journalist from a red-top newspaper. During that period I was pursued by the tabloids. Indeed, I was offered eye-watering sums of money to tell my story.
One paper dangled an extraordinary £1 million in front of me.
But I never did take their money. I quickly realised that the more I said, the more I would fan the flames, and the longer the story would linger, until Jasper himself would be able to read about it.
That was the last thing I wanted. The best way to protect my son was to simply shut up until the public interest in us both died away.
And this is what so astonishes and concerns me about Spare, the wildly revelatory book by Prince Harry.
Each time I read or hear another word by him about his rift with the royals or the misery of his life pre-Meghan, I wince for his two young children. With so much dirty linen being washed in public, so many accusations flung, how on earth is it going to affect Archie, aged three, and one-year-old Lilibet, in future?
At this rate, I fear Harry is perpetuating for his own children those same feelings of vulnerability, insecurity and ‘spareness’ that he himself so palpably possesses.
My own public storm was on an infinitely smaller scale, but nevertheless took stoicism and guts to weather.
In 1997 I was features editor at the magazine Country Life, which is where I met the photographer Tony Snowdon, who was then married to his second wife, Lucy LindsayHogg. I was 34 at the time. We began a fouryear relationship and Jasper was born.
At first, Tony and I kept our meetings between us. No one at work knew the truth of Jasper’s parentage, and he was simply referred to as the ‘office baby’.
But the secret could not be kept for long. Snowdon was a popular, compelling figure, more famous than most of the celebrities whose pictures he took, and public interest in him was seemingly limitless.
When, in 1998, news of Jasper’s existence got out, I had 72 journalists camped outside my front door and, as a journalist myself, I understood the interest. I went into hiding for a week, with no one but my kind host and his assistant knowing where I was.
I imagine it was both easier and trickier for me to deal with the subsequent maelstrom than it has been for Harry in recent years. I’m not sure I’d have survived had social media loomed as large as it does now.
And yet, unlike Harry, I was a ‘civilian’, and of course I had no protection from the Royal Family or sophisticated PR teams.
I recall moments of intense fear. Once I was followed down the street by two men as I wheeled my then weeks-old baby in a pram. They were paparazzi, but at the time I experienced that awful pumping heartbeat, as if hounded. By the time I got home, I was shaking so much, I could barely dial the phone to tell Tony what had happened.
I felt betrayed once or twice, too. One piece featured my stepmother, the only member of my family or friendship group to speak to the Press — and from my ‘family seat’, a house in Worthing I’d never been to.
‘Tony and Melanie are so in love,’ she said. She’d never met him.
Some commentators concluded I was ‘ugly’, had become pregnant ‘deliberately’ to ensnare Snowdon, was a money-grabbing ‘harlot’ and more. Thank goodness Twitter did not exist back then.
Tony and I ended our relationship a few years later, through my choice, but we remained close until his death in 2017.
To say it was a stressful period in my life is an understatement.
Jasper was never a good sleeper — awake on the hour, every hour, more or less from 10pm to 5am — and I was raising him single-handedly while still at Country Life and negotiating a complicated relationship with his father. Much of that era is a fog, but I recall mornings when I could barely move with exhaustion.
Yet I refused to seek ‘revenge’ or lash out against those I felt had done me wrong. Instead, I focused on being a mother to my boy and concentrated on turning my negative experiences into positives for him.
I made a calculation. I would give one gentle, controlled interview to Hello! magazine when Jasper was seven months old, with the full approval of his father. It would help me buy a small property at a stage when Jasper and I had nowhere to live. And then I would shut up about it all until my son was grown.
Still, I hated every second of that interview. The journalist arrived early, before Jasper’s babysitter had a chance to whisk him away. That wrong-footed me and made me hugely anxious.
With each word I spoke, I fretted about how it might affect those involved in my story, including Jasper and Tony who, after agreeing to it, offered little advice on what to say.
I featured on the front cover, inevitably as Lord Snowdon’s mistress, and spent the week the magazine came out hiding from all the news agencies wanting to follow up.
I stress again that I understood the level of interest. But what I did not do was broadcast my own hurt and complex feelings, as Harry has done so toxically. Not only would that jeopardise my relationship with Jasper’s father, it would also damage, perhaps irreparably, Jasper’s own relationship with him. I was infinitely careful not to do that.
Any mistakes Tony and I had made were not Jasper’s fault. I was determined to be the bigger person and not visit the sins of the father, or indeed the mother, onto the child.
Almost certainly as a result, he now has a thriving relationship with his families on both sides. Will Harry’s children be able to say the same of their relationship with their cousins, Princes George and Louis and Princess Charlotte? Or, more likely, has Harry’s behaviour wrecked the potential bond between them?
Besides, I did not want to be simply remembered as Lord Snowdon’s mistress — another kind of ‘spare’.
No matter how tempting it might have been to correct hurtful judgments, I had no desire to be forever known as the bitter woman on the sidelines.
Invariably, those who cannot let go of their bitterness end up being defined by it. I cannot believe Harry wants to go down in history as the hostile ‘spare’ lobbing salvoes at his bewildered family from across the Atlantic, nor for his children to view him that way either.
Yet the book, plus all those interminable interviews dripping with resentment, have cemented his public image as a man of great bitterness.
Like Harry, I know what it’s like to have suffered in your youth. I did not lose my mother, but I had a dysfunctional, emotionally abusive childhood in my early years, following my parents’ divorce when I was 12 and my sister eight. I gave up on school and emerged at the age of 16
I gave one gentle interview after Jasper’s birth — then I shut up
with one O-level in art. At 17, I even contemplated suicide.
I caught up educationally later, but I still carry the emotional scars of my childhood. Sadly, I rarely see my father and barely know his child from his second marriage, my younger half-brother.
This was not what I wanted for Jasper. It wasn’t easy and I was certainly not a perfect mother, but my goal was to remove from him any hint of the awful emotional instabilities I’d had as a child.
My mission was to lay down solid foundations for him to fall back on, particularly given the unusual circumstances of his birth and the fame of his father.
Psychologists call the process by which one generation passes on psychological issues to the next ‘transgenerational trauma’.
Harry surely knows all about this. Indeed, he has spoken in the past of ‘genetic pain’ and wanting to break ‘the cycle’ of trauma within the Royal Family. And yet here he is, dishing the dirt so liberally and in such scatter-gun fashion, that it can only turbo-charge the very pain he wants to end.
In Spare, he supplies such a torrent of hurt, peppered with salacious titbits regarding former girlfriends and losing his virginity, that he is now as famous for his private life as Kim Kardashian. It is an odd way to go about reclaiming your privacy or healing your trauma.
In fact, I detect not only pathos but also a childish whine in the title of Harry’s book.
I sometimes wonder how he’d have coped had he been born a woman. Women are even further down the aristocratic pecking order than ‘spares’, thanks to the rule of primogeniture where the eldest male inherits everything (changes to that rule within the Royal Family only apply to those born after 2011).
I’m the eldest in my family, for example, but my father’s hereditary title as a baronet will go to my much younger halfbrother. It’s obviously unfair, an ancient piece of gross sexism, but I have not allowed it to fester.
There’s no point. Why would I want to carry a chip on my shoulder all my life when I could be happy instead? It seems to me Harry needs to learn this lesson as quickly as he can.
Today, I am happy. The way I handled my relationship with Lord Snowdon and Jasper’s birth paid off. Jasper is now 24, is well-balanced, well-adjusted and has more emotional maturity and level-headedness than I ever enjoyed.
Professionally and privately, it helped that he holds my surname — Cable-Alexander — instead of that of his father, which was Armstrong-Jones. That was my decision, but Tony did not object.
It means that Jasper isn’t automatically associated with his father, so he has avoided questions about his family from strangers and cannot be accused of nepotism at work. Aged 12, he decided he wanted to be a filmmaker. Apart from one introduction I made for him when he was 11 — to a leading
Those who cannot let go of bitterness end up defined by it
talent agent, who told him to come back if he was still keen at 16 — he has carved out his own career path. He directed his first advertisement, aged 18, under the auspices of celebrated photographer and director Rankin.
As for me, my biggest achievement has been to be known as Jasper CableAlexander’s mother. That is infinitely better than to have been perpetually stamped as Lord Snowdon’s mistress. Harry would do well to let go of his fractured soul and ego, and focus on his own small family. It will make him a much happier individual to think of them more than himself.
And it will lay to rest old grudges and wounds far more effectively than a tell-all book — and spare his children from becoming tortured souls, too.