After the Second World War, Ben Nicolson, son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, resumed his position as Deputy Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, working under Anthony Blunt. In 1946 he was invited to Windsor Castle for ten days as a guest of the King and Queen. On four of those days, parlour games were played after dinner. He described them to the Labour politician Richard Crossman, who duly recorded them in his diary.
The master of ceremonies took all the male guests outside and provided them with brass pokers, shovels, etc. After ten minutes’ practice they were then made to parade as a squad, with the shovels and pokers on their shoulders, in slow goose step down the long drawing room past the King, the Queen and the Princesses, who found it exquisite fun seeing Stafford Cripps, Lord Ismay and Anthony Eden doing ‘Eyes Right.’
Nicolson told Crossman that ‘he hadn’t seen anything like Stafford Cripps, who had been forced at two hours’ notice to spend a weekend at Windsor and who humbly obeyed the Royal command but suffered the full humiliation which Royalty seemed determined to extract from its Commoner guests’.
Small wonder, then, if Princess Margaret grew up with an imperious streak, a presumption that the rest of the world had a duty to perform at the flick of a finger, and an unforgiving view of politicians. ‘I hate them. They never listen to anything I say or answer my questions,’ she complained to a friend. ‘Even Sir Winston Churchill would just grunt.’
She relished making dismissive generalisations about those to whom she was obliged to engage in small talk during her Royal progress. ‘All the town clerks are exactly the same,’ she would say; and, of the university of which she was chancellor, ‘All the students at Keele have just discovered Marx.’ She was barely more approving of those in her own family, describing her grandmother, Queen Mary, as ‘absolutely terrifying’, and her grandfather, King George V, as ‘a most objectionable old man’ to a visiting biographer.
Though she affected a kind of monarchical indifference to party politics, her own opinions were deeply conservative. ‘I don’t mind who’s in government so long as they’re good at governing. What we must avoid at all costs is these windscreen wipers: left, right, left, right,’ she opines in Edward St Aubyn’s roman à clef, Some Hope. Giving money to the poor, she thought, somehow makes them less disciplined, and therefore less happy: ‘What it really shows is the emptiness of the socialist dream. They thought that every problem could be solved by throwing money at it, but it simply isn’t true. People may have been poor, but they were happy because they lived in real communities. My mother says that when she visited the East End during the Blitz she met more people there with real dignity than you could hope to find in the entire corps diplomatique.’
She offered a fuller view of her political outlook in a private letter to the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who had written to the Princess after she had been admitted to the London Clinic for an operation to remove a benign skin lesion. Mrs Thatcher’s letter had touched on her recent visit to New York (‘they are so easy to please and so delighted if you say what you really think’) and the steel strike (‘it is difficult to get across the message that more money has to be earned and not just demanded’). Princess Margaret’s handwritten reply is dated 7 February 1980:
My dear Prime Minister
I write belatedly to thank you for your kind letter. I just had to have some things dug out of my face but luckily everything went well and we’re not worrying.
I was so interested to hear about your visit to the United States. I expect you surprised them no end at answering their questions in a positive way, when they are used to waffling on for hours in figures of 8, not actually answering anything.
The steel strike is depressing. I well remember when Charles Villiers took it over. I congratulated him on his courage and he said, ‘I am taking on a moribund, old fashioned, out of date, uneconomical, out of date industry’ and I said ‘Is there any hope of improving it?’ and he said ‘Very little’.
I suppose if one is an ordinary working man and one’s union tells one not to vote for new machinery or technology because otherwise you will lose your job or your card – you just don’t dare.
I went to Cambridge for a debate (rather dull, all about the church, lots of clerics) and found them all rabid conservatives – not a Trotskyite to argue with!
They were passionately against the Olympic Games in Moscow. I tried the ‘isn’t it hard on the athletes’ bit but they were adamant. I suppose individuals must choose whether to go as it’s up to the Olympic Committee.
If that silly boxer* doesn’t make a hash of it he might get Africa to cock a snook at the Russians.
I find it quite impossible to find out what is happening in Afghanistan. Are they about to wheel into Iran and get all the oil? More power to your policy of nuclear power stations.
I wish they weren’t called ‘nuclear’ as people always think of the bomb. I’ve been advocating this since I was 20!
Many thanks for allocating £10,000 to the NSPCC. They are vital and I am President and support their free service.
With again many thanks for your letter.
Yours very sincerely,
Margaret
* Muhammad Ali, who had been sent to Tanzania, Nigeria and Senegal by the US government to campaign for a boycott of the Games.