45

During their engagement, Tony and Margaret were invited to dinner by Colin and Anne Tennant. The conversation turned to their honeymoon: they would, they said, be sailing around the Caribbean.

‘Why don’t you stop off at Mustique?’ asked Tennant. On a whim, he had bought an entire island for £45,000 three years before, despite it having no fresh water or electricity. ‘It’s very primitive but it has magical beaches. Anne and I will be there, living in our hut, and we won’t bother you at all.’

Thus the newlyweds first set eyes on Mustique from the deck of the royal yacht. Not unusually for the Princess, she was disappointed. ‘The island looked like Kenya,’ she recalled. ‘Burnt to a frazzle. We drove down a path, the only road, and sat in the brush whacking mosquitoes.’

The royal couple were greeted by the Tennants on the newly built jetty, Tony Snapshot moodily lurking three paces behind the bronzed, beaming Margaret. The Tennants had cobbled together a little bamboo hut to provide shade. Beneath a roof of coconut fronds, the four of them sipped glasses of lukewarm lemonade. Sensing that she was in a good mood, Colin turned to Margaret and reminded her that he still owed her a wedding present. ‘Look, Ma’am, would you like something in a little box, or’ – and here he swung an arm around – ‘a piece of land?’

‘A piece of land,’ replied Margaret, without missing a beat. Tony managed a smile, but inwardly he was bristling with irritation. Why hadn’t he been included in the offer? Why was Tennant always trying to do him down? Knowingly or unknowingly, Tennant had just delivered Tony yet another grievance ready for the nursing. ‘Odd, don’t you think?’ Tony remarked to Princess Margaret’s biographer, Tim Heald, nearly half a century later. In the same conversation he would refer to Tennant once again as ‘that shit’.