The royals - Kitty Kelley [121]
“What the blazes do they do? What size bedchamber is this? All right, the Queen Mother is an old-age pensioner and we say, ‘Yes, she has always got a pleasant smile on her face.’ But my God. If my wife got that pay, she would never stop laughing.”
Tory members stamped their feet in protest. To criticize the expenditures of the Queen Mother sounded blasphemous to them. “This is an obscene speech,” yelled one Conservative MP. But Hamilton pushed on, objecting to the raise proposed for Princess Margaret. “For this expensive kept woman?” he roared. “She should be sacked.”
Not even Her Majesty was immune. Hamilton harrumphed: “There are one thousand women in my constituency who could do the Queen’s job.”
At first the Palace had tried to ignore Hamilton and dismiss him as a nuisance. “He’s a bloody communist,” said Prince Philip, who had been criticized in Parliament for saying that England should worry more about its deserving rich than its hopeless poor. Outrage in the House of Commons* over that comment forced the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, to remind critics of a long-established custom “to speak with respect of members of the royal family.” There was no such rebuke from the Prime Minister after Willie Hamilton’s attack.
“He’s just a common† little Scotsman,” said Princess Margaret, spitting out “common” like a fur ball. Her cut-glass accent sliced the word with contempt. For her, the rigid dictates of the class system ruled. People were defined solely by bloodline—not character, education, wealth, or accomplishment. Birth determined worth. And royalty stood at the top of humanity’s ladder. Everybody else scrambled below with no hope of ascending. The Princess spared no one, not even her paternal grandmother. “I detested Queen Mary,” she told Gore Vidal. “She was rude to all of us, except Lilibet, who was going to be Queen. Of course, she [Queen Mary] had an inferiority complex. We were royal, and she was not.”
As royalty, Margaret did not carry cash. Nor did she pay her own bills. She didn’t even own a credit card. Her finances were handled by the head of her household, who managed her allotment from her Civil List. She complained constantly about her paltry allowance and was not above bartering.
“One Christmas someone gave her a huge gift basket with all sorts of bubble baths, perfumes, oils, and lotions that took two people to carry,” said William C. Brewer, a former associate of Crabtree & Evelyn, the fragrance company. “The Princess and her lady-in-waiting came into our shop in Kensington the day after Christmas with the mammoth gift. I knew it was Princess Margaret from the springalator platform shoes. She had come to return the gift, and she refused to accept a store credit. ‘I want cash,’ she said. What could we do? Although it’s against store policy, we gave her a cash refund because she’s Princess Margaret. The lady-in-waiting took the money and the two of them walked out.”
Margaret expects to be accommodated because she is royalty. Her mother and her sister have the same expectations. When they are invited to be houseguests (or, more accurately, when their ladies-in-waiting call their friends who have large country estates and inquire about the possibility of a royal visit), advance people arrive to make sure that the weekend premises will be suitable, not just for security, but for royal comfort.
When the Queen Mother visited British barrister Michael Pratt, he told friends that her lady-in-waiting arrived beforehand with a list of instructions: gin and tonic in the bedroom, no noisy children, and bronco paper fanned out in the bathroom. “Bronco paper is a heavy, rough, brown paper that is abrasive and good for cleaning motor oil off the linoleum,” recalled one of Pratt’s friends. “Most people want only the softest toilet tissue for their bums, but that old horse insists on having sandpaper wipes from World War Two when the country was on rations. They don’t even sell bronco paper anymore. You have to special-order it on Walton Street, or else fake it by sloshing tea