Noel Botham - Margaret--The Last Real Princess

A simple accident of birth being the youngest child should have placed Princess Margaret on the periphery of future royal events. But nothing in this remarkable womans life has ever been that simple. Only centre stage could satisfy her.

From the beginning, she chose to follow her own star, to shape her own destiny and to cheat history of the genteel and reputable role that it appeared to have carefully mapped out for her.

Princess Margaret chose to walk on the wild side, an outrageously colourful but bumpy route, chronicled in lurid detail by the worlds media. History offers no other royal candidate to match her. There has never been a princess like her and probably never will be.

No one has been as good at enjoying the good life. No pleasure has been left untried. No one has loved more rapaciously or pursued a life of utter excess with such flagrant, and wonderful, disregard for moral or royal restraints. On the contrary, she has used every scrap of royal influence she could muster for her sexual gratification and hedonistic fulfilment.

In her youth, she embodied the spirit of gaiety and became, in the late Forties and Fifties, a bewitching pied piper to the Hooray Henry generation of her day.

A stunningly beautiful and arrogant temptress, she could make men crazy with wanting while treating them with a unique imperialism which left them feeling emasculated.

Even in such a permissive age, her sexual adventures set new limits on outrageous behaviour among high society and kept the whole world spellbound for half her lifetime.

Her self-indulgences sometimes produced quite sluttish behaviour but she has never felt the need either to exhibit remorse or make apology. Throughout her life, she has revelled in her almost unimaginable privilege and wealth. She has enjoyed it, used it and exploited it as her absolute right.

She is the plenary princess. The perfect parasite.

In many ways, she is to be admired for her radical and daring lifestyle and, as a woman, she was a whole generation, at least, ahead of her time.

Had her liberal and unconventional convictions and behaviour been more widely broadcast, she would doubtlessly have become a cult figure among women and an icon of the feminist movement.

Princess Margaret was physically and mentally precocious. At 16, she considered herself a fully mature woman, already driven by the desires and passion which were to influence her choices for a lifetime.

At that age, she embraced Diors new look and influenced older womens dress style world wide. When she met Dior in Paris, she told him, Thank you for creating the New Look. It was as though she secretly believed he had done it just for her. After a further year, from the age of seventeen, Margaret would never again wear casual clothes. The rest of her life would be spent dressing, always as though for a public appearance.

Amazingly sensual and tactile, with a flawless skin, vivid blue eyes and blessed with an hour-glass figure, she was never afraid to explore her own sexuality, and responded, characteristically, with enthusiasm when encouraged to join with other young women to probe the limits of her libido before taking her first male lover.

Perhaps it is because she did indulge in lebian love affairs that it did not unduly worry Margaret that some of the men in her life might have dallied with homosexuality before beginning a relationship with her. Most shared a marked effeteness, which she appeared to like, possibly because it made them appear more vulnerable and sensitive, and reminded her of her almost idolised father.

There was a vulgar side, too, which Margaret was never afraid to explore. She enjoyed watching pornographic movies in company, took explicit, full-frontal snaps of some of her male friends and accepted cocaines social usage long before it became universally fashionable, enjoying the occasional secret snort with her showbusiness friends.

Margaret has never been deferential to anyone, least of all a lover and including even the Queen. And that has been a major asset to Elizabeth who accepts her sister as her only honest and unbiased critic.

Despite many accounts to the contrary, Margaret has never been envious of the Queen. Her chief emotion has been that of sympathy, coupled with enormous admiration, at just how much her sister has sacrificed to sit on the throne.

In return, Elizabeth has always tried to protect Margaret, while forgiving her for even the most outrageous scandals. Partly, say friends, because she feels guilt at being born the eldest and thus condemning her sister to a lifetime of being a second-hand rose, and partly for the major role she played in steering Margaret away from marriage to Peter Townsend the Princesss first public romance.

In truth, that marriage was never really on. The role of heartbroken princess having to give up the man she loved for dutys sake was just that, a role, and too good a part for the drama-loving Princess to resist playing out to the bitter end.

While Townsend was exiled in Brussels, it didnt prevent Margaret enjoying a series of romantic flings back in England. Those with Colin Tennant and Dominic Elliott were the most talked about. But that didnt prevent her jumping into bed with Townsend during clandestine weekends when he sneaked back to London. Or rushing back to the arms of others when he was gone. Margaret revelled in her grand romance with

Townsend but was never sufficiently in love with him to give up her uniquely cushioned and pampered lifestyle. Yet because of her skilful projection of maltreatment and grief over the Townsend affair, she has managed to milk the Royal Family and the public of their sympathy and indulgence for nearly half a century, invoking, whenever necessary, legendary tragic memories to gloss over her tawdry excesses and vulgar bed-hopping addiction.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, the sexual shenanigans of her nephews wives, Diana and Sarah Ferguson, scandalised a generation.

But their adulterous liaisons, even when combined, become trifling, two-dimensional peccadillos compared with those of Margaret. They were merely petites filles mchantes and she a grande femme fatale.

Today, Margaret grows disgracefully older. Cantankerous, increasingly arrogant and rude and utterly unrepentant or apologetic for any of her scandalous behaviour in the past.

Being Princess Margaret is never having to say one is sorry. Never having to say one is wrong.

Margaret grew up in a time-warp; for that, in effect, is what her upbringing in the Royal Family was. She received virtually no formal education and was isolated from ordinary people.

She is ignorant rather than stupid, and like Marie Antoinette, to whom she has often been compared, knows very little about her sisters subjects needs or feelings.

It was never thought worthwhile enough for her to be taught.

Many of the Royal Familys closely-guarded secrets are centred around Princess Margaret. One of the most carefully protected, until now, is he flirtation with the Catholic faith, following her split with toy-boy lover Roddy Llewellyn. The end of her affair may have temporarily dampened her spirit but in no way dimished her passion for scandal. Margaret became besotted with a handsome, extremely dashing young civil servant, Derek Jennings, who was later to become a Catholic priest. It was to prove her last great passion and, as did so many of her relationships, it ended, almost predictably, in tragedy.

The milestones in Princess Margarets life have far too often been coloured by calamitous events, and since a consultation with medical specialists in 1974 she has borne the added strain of knowing she suffers from a form of the madness of King George illness, porphyria, an affliction that can be treated, but never cured.