I Was Once Photographed by…
Like many, I have an ambivalence to royalty. I once shook hands with the Queen and Prince Philip when they visited the Times, in February 1985. ‘This is Nicholas Shakespeare – he’s written a book about royalty,’ a bored-looking Prince Philip was informed. ‘Oh really?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, beaming broadly. He waited an appropriate length of time for me not to tell him the title (‘The Men Who Would Be King: Royalty in Exile’), before moving on. On several occasions, though, I did have dinner with Princess Margaret.
This portrait of her taking a photo of me (second right) was captured in 1993 in the Oxford drawing-room of my friend Angela Huth, the writer who had been her lady-in-waiting, and Angie’s husband, James Howard-johnston (third left). Also in the photo are the travel writer Colin Thubron (third right), the journalist Trevor Grove (far right) and the philanthropist Max Rayne (second left).
It was in this room that I had first met Princess Margaret, eight years previously, on 12 October 1985, for a weekend booked 12 months in advance and costing the hosts, who had to put up the detectives, a small fortune (£8,000 was the whisper). My diary for that evening reads, ‘She broke into a Paul Robeson song, drank whisky, smoked through a holder and lacked the ability to converse. She’d say something, I’d say something in reply, & she’d say something to follow on from her original remark. This, I suspect, is because she expects people not to answer back, and so lacks the knowledge of dialogue. She was dressed like a frump and jabbed me often. I quite liked her.’
Among other guests then were the Isaiah Berlins and Iris Murdoch and her jovial bespectacled husband John Bayley, who winked every now then at me through a cracked lens.
At one point, Iris Murdoch, wearing a loose-fitting garment that resembled a Sketchley’s laundry bag, confessed that in another life she’d like to be a dress designer. When I asked Prince Margaret, ‘Ma’am, would you like to wear an Iris Murdoch dress?’, she snapped, ‘It’s not “Marm”; it’s “Mam”.’ She seemed to share the same ignorance about what we were drinking as Boris Johnson later displayed towards a pint of milk; she said, ‘How much does a bottle of champagne cost?’
Later that evening, she asked me for a reading list – but no paperbacks ‘because they’re printed on blotting paper and the spine breaks and the pages run away and there’s no one to pick them up.’
After that: drinks in Kensington Palace, dinner at the Berkeley, dinner for her 60th at Wadham, more gatherings at Angie’s, and, most vivid, a lunch at Kathleen Tynan’s with Dirk Bogarde, Victoria Glendinning and Simon Callow. ‘Princess Margaret in a lavatory blue dress,’ I noted. When Simon Callow lit a match for her cigarette, she went on ferreting in her purse for a lighter.
‘I detest matches,’ she said, as we all in mute horror watched the flame creep closer to Callow’s fingers, burning them. Nicholas Shakespeare