Within a week, the poet laureate, Andrew Motion, had composed a brand-new poem to mark the Princess’s death. He called it ‘The Younger Sister’. It reads much as though a taxi driver were holding forth to a grandee in the back of his cab: ‘The luxuries, of course, and privilege – the money, houses, holidays, the lot: all these were real, and all these drove a wedge between your life and ours.’ But when chopped up, it looks more like poetry:
The luxuries, of course, and privilege –
The money, houses, holidays, the lot:
All these were real, and all these drove a wedge
Between your life and ours.
Motion was suggesting, of course, that money, houses, holidays – ‘the lot’ – were absent from his own particular life, and from the lives of almost everyone other than the late Princess, and that this imbalance somehow ‘drove a wedge/Between your life and ours’.
All very well; but then the poet laureate seemed to have second thoughts:
And yet the thought
Of how no privilege on earth can keep
A life from suffering in love and loss –
This means we turn to you and see how deep
The current runs between yourself and us.
Thus, Motion (or ‘us’, as he styled himself) had, over the course of a couple of lines, come to feel that, when push comes to shove, we are all akin to Her Royal Highness:
And now death spells it out again, and more,
As it becomes your final human act:
A daughter gone before her mother goes:
A younger sister heading on before;
A woman in possession of the fact
That love and duty speak two languages.
His effort was met with a widespread thumbs-down. A.N. Wilson, never one to mince his words, criticised the poem as ‘extraordinarily impertinent’, condemning Motion as ‘a Royal Lickspittle’, and adding, ‘All he’s done as Laureate … is to persuade me that this rather absurd position should be abolished.’ A month later, in March 2002, the left-wing poet Adrian Mitchell protested at Motion’s obsequiousness by declaring himself the ‘anti-poet laureate’, and vowing to have himself installed in the post at a ceremony in Trafalgar Square.
After hearing of the death of Princess Margaret, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Rev George Carey, went to pay his respects. He was a devotee of all members of the Royal Family, going so far as to wonder, in his autobiography, Know the Truth, ‘if our nation [is] actually worthy of their devotion and unflagging sense of duty’. In the same work, he described Prince Andrew as ‘outgoing, direct and entertaining’, and the Duchess of York as ‘a refreshing young woman’. He also paid tribute to Prince Philip’s ‘inimitable sense of humour’, and called the then Camilla Parker-Bowles ‘a most attractive and charming person, warm-hearted and intelligent, with a down-to-earth attitude’. Above all, he claimed to have developed a ‘special friendship’ with Princess Margaret. ‘She had very firm views about religious services, and would have no truck whatsoever with “new-fangled” services, so the Book of Common Prayer rite would always be used when she was present.’
The former archbishop recalled celebrating communion at the Princess’s bedside. ‘The effect of the steroids she had been prescribed showed in her swollen face and she was rather depressed that evening,’ he revealed, ‘but she noticeably brightened up during the simple and short service.’ Afterwards, he had anointed the Princess with olive oil his wife Eileen had brought back from Bethlehem, before decanting it into a smaller flask. After suggesting that the Princess might like to anoint herself nightly, he presented her with the flask. ‘Princess Margaret was thrilled with it.’
Popping his head around the door after her death, Carey was now gratified to note that the ‘attractive little flask’ of Eileen’s olive oil lay between the two candles flickering in the semi-gloom above her coffin.