For two and a half years the Princess’s office at Kensington Palace was able to dismiss rumours of an affair with Roddy Llewellyn as so much gossip and tittle-tattle. Partly thanks to Colin Tennant’s beady eye, anyone looking remotely journalistic was turned away from Mustique. This meant that the press had no firm evidence of an affair. But in February 1976 a New Zealand journalist managed to slip through the net, and photographed the pair sitting at the beach bar together, the Princess in her floral swimsuit. From then on, Margaret and Roddy were sitting ducks, perfect targets for finger-wagging from the politicians, tut-tuttery from opinionators, and tomfoolery from satirists.
‘I suppose young Roddy Llewellyn knows what he is doing gallivanting around the tropical island of Mustique with a foreign lady old enough to be his mother,’ wrote Auberon Waugh in his Private Eye diary on 22 February 1976. ‘… I am sure that Marje Proops would agree with me when I suggest that a prolonged association between people of very different age groups seldom comes to much good. But if Roddy is too shy to write to either of us for advice he should go for a quiet word with Group Captain Peter Townsend in the French village near Rambouillet where he has retired and where he is famous for his scarred and hunted look.’
Those in search of less sophisticated comedy could find it in every bar and on every street corner. ‘Have you heard that Roddy Llewellyn’s taken up acting?’ went one of the jokes doing the rounds at that time. ‘He’s got a small part in Charlie’s Aunt.’
From the Labour benches in Parliament, the veteran republican Willie Hamilton called on the chancellor of the exchequer, Denis Healey, to withdraw the Princess’s income. ‘Even when she is here, a lot of her so-called engagements are audiences which last perhaps a couple of minutes. There are charity balls and premieres which are really entertainment, yet which are called official engagements.’
That August, Princess Margaret and Roddy went to a raucous house party at The Glen. Their fellow guests included John Phillips, Bianca Jagger and Prince Rupert Loewenstein.* The weekend culminated in an amateur concert performance for friends and neighbours, at which Princess Margaret dressed up in a slinky black dress, a feather boa and a curly blonde wig, and pretended to be Sophie Tucker, performing her risqué ‘Red Hot Mama’ routine.
Anne Tennant took photographs, then placed the negatives in a drawer for safekeeping. But they were purloined by her son Charlie, a heroin addict; through a dodgy third party he sold them to the Daily Mail for £7,000, of which only £100 found its way back to Charlie.
Photographs of the Princess and Roddy were at a premium. At one time or another, various members of the Tennant family had struggled, not always successfully, with the temptation of putting them to good use. One such photograph had been taken when Mustique had been infected by the incautious 1970s craze for streaking. ‘Colin went through a short “streaking” period and would drop his trunks at the earliest opportunity,’ recalled his friend and biographer Nicholas Courtney. At a picnic on the beach, Tennant had turned to the Princess. ‘Would you mind awfully, Ma’am, if I were to remove my swimming trunks?’
‘So long as I don’t have to look at IT,’ replied the Princess, ring-fencing the final word with a withering emphasis. But her squeamishness did nothing to deter Tennant, who stripped naked and persuaded Roddy Llewellyn and Courtney to follow suit. The Princess herself remained firmly in her carefully upholstered floral chintz swimming costume.
Tennant borrowed Llewellyn’s camera and took a snap of the Princess with the stark-naked Llewellyn and Courtney on either side of her, the skirts of her swimming costume enveloping, or at least obscuring, her two companions’ private parts. In turn, the Princess took photographs of the three naked men performing comical poses together.
Tennant took care to remove the film from Roddy’s camera. He wanted to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands, without realising that the wrong hands were none other than his own. Rather than destroy the negatives, he arranged for them to be developed by his local chemist in Scotland; he then squirrelled the prints away in the bottom drawer of his desk.
Years later, in her published diaries, Tennant’s arty half-sister Emma revealed that she had been plotting to steal either these photographs, or others in a similarly fruity vein. With the proceeds, she hoped to finance an avant-garde literary magazine called, coincidentally, Bananas. Timing her arrival at The Glen for an hour when everybody would be out at the swimming pool, she stole her way through the hall and into the drawing room, where she uncovered her sister-in-law’s photograph albums in their usual safe place. Sifting through them, she found the recent snaps of Mustique. ‘Palm trees of course, one or two of them set at picturesque angles to show we are really in the Caribbean here – without them one could imagine a house party in the south of England on a hot day. Upper-class families are sprawled on wicker chairs, one lordling actually hurling what seems to be a bread roll in a picture of Basil’s Bar … Women, dukes’ daughters and ex-wives, in huge hats as if at Ascot …’
Eventually, she chanced upon the most coveted photograph of all, ‘and I deliver it from the confines of four little grey tucks in the stiff grey paper. I thrust Princess Margaret – there’s no time to see if she’s actually naked, but the picture gives at first glance that impression – into my shirt, open-necked on this fine summer’s day. Roddy Llewellyn comes into my bosom, too: he’s very much in focus, attentive, even loving, clearly an amorous couple is what this holiday snap announces.’
At this point, Colin came into the room. Quick as a flash, Emma returned the album to its place, and stood upright. ‘I feel the purloined photo cut into my flesh, anchored by the top of my bra, and I wonder, for the first time as I am ashamed to own, whether it will really fetch the money needed to start up a literary magazine. However, I can hardly fish it out now, the consequences being too extreme even to imagine.’ Back in London, ‘glamorous friends … advise me crisply on the subject of selling P.M. in semi-flagrante’. The journalist James Fox told her that Paris Match paid best.
But she had too many qualms to be able to follow through on her dastardly plan. Paralysed by conscience, she stowed the offending photograph in a volume by Diderot. A week or two later, she learned that her sister-in-law had noticed the disappearance of the photograph, and had called in the Peebles police. All the staff were now being cross-questioned. Deciding that her escapade had gone far enough, Emma attempted to flush the offending photograph down the lavatory, but it kept bobbing to the surface, so she fished it out, locked the bathroom door, employed a pair of nail scissors to cut it into pieces, and then tried to flush them all down again. Alas, ‘the faces and other portions of Princess Margaret and her companion floated determinedly through repeated flushings. Finally, maddened and punished by their resolve never to go down, I had to pick out the pieces and wrap them in old newspaper before consigning them dangerously to the bin.’*
Some time later, in February 1976, a selection of Mustique photographs appeared in the News of the World. In some of them Roddy was wearing the very same Union Jack swimming trunks he had bought with Princess Margaret on their first shopping trip together. True to form, Willie Hamilton demanded in the House of Commons that the Princess be ‘sacked’. A week later, the same photographs were published again, this time in full colour, in Paris Match. ‘Few believed Colin when he said that he had nothing to do with the sale,’ observes Courtney in his biography.
Their publication accelerated the Snowdons’ separation. Even within the confines of Kensington Palace, the Princess’s embarrassment presented Tony with a golden opportunity: he was now perfectly placed to portray himself as the wronged party. He declared that he felt humiliated, that his position was ‘quite intolerable’, and that a separation was the only possible solution. ‘Lord Snowdon,’ Margaret was to tell Nigel Dempster years later, ‘was devilish cunning.’
The day after the photographs appeared in the News of the World – a Monday – Snowdon summoned the Princess’s private secretary, Lord Napier, and showed him the newspaper. ‘What’s going on?’
Though Snowdon proved adept at playing the part of the startled cuckold, Napier remained unconvinced. Everyone in Britain, and many further afield, had been aware for months that Princess Margaret had been having a fling with Roddy Llewellyn. Nor was Snowdon blameless in that department: he himself was in the middle of his long affair with Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, whom he was eventually to marry. Napier told Snowdon to stop being so ridiculous.
At this point Snowdon buzzed his secretary, Dorothy Everard.* ‘Dotty, we’re leaving.’ Then he turned to Napier. ‘We’ll be out by the end of the week.’
This left Lord Napier with the tricky task of telling Princess Margaret, who was still on Mustique. Aware that the phone line was leaky, he couched what he said in a wary mixture of code and euphemism.
‘Ma’am, I have been talking to ROBERT. He has given in his notice. He will be leaving by the end of the week.’
Unfortunately, the Princess did not catch his drift. ‘Have you taken leave of your senses? What ARE you talking about?’
Napier repeated what he had to say, extra slowly: ‘ROBERT – has – given – in – his – notice. He – will – be – out – by – the – end – of – the – week.’
At this point, the Princess suddenly clocked that Robert was her husband’s third name. ‘Oh, I SEE! Thank you, Nigel. I think that’s the best news you’ve ever given me.’
* Full name Rupert Louis Ferdinand Frederick Constantine Lofredo Leopold Herbert Maximilian Hubert John Henry zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg (1933–2014), banker and financial adviser. Best known for his highly successful management of the business interests of the Rolling Stones for nearly forty years. In 2005, Jagger, Richards and Watts earned £81.3 million while paying tax at 1.6 per cent.
* A more dramatic theft gave rise to the 2007 film The Bank Job, which is predicated on the hypothesis that sexually compromising photographs of Princess Margaret were at the centre of a raid on Lloyd’s Bank in Baker Street in 1971. The robbers had rented a leather-goods shop two doors down. Over the course of three weeks, they dug a tunnel forty feet long. The photographs had apparently been placed in the bank by Michael X, a criminal originally from the Caribbean, who was later hanged for murder in Trinidad. Though half a million pounds were indeed stolen from the bank, the film is more speculative in suggesting that the raid was organised by MI5, purely to suppress the photographs. The Heath government stopped further investigation of the raid by issuing a D-Notice, consequently fanning this rumour.
* By a curious coincidence, ‘Everard’ was also the name of the close friend often mentioned onstage by the comedian Larry Grayson (1923–95). Dorothy Everard was perhaps best known for playing Pass the Parcel and dancing The Gay Gordons.