In the 1980s she paid an official visit to Derbyshire in order to open the new district council offices in Matlock. Among those on hand to receive her was Matthew Parris, at that time the local Conservative MP. ‘It was 10 a.m.,’ he recalled. ‘I drank instant coffee. She drank gin and tonic.’

Having opened the offices, she was driven to the north of the constituency to open some sheltered bungalows for old people. A dish of coronation chicken had been specially cooked for her. ‘This looks like sick,’ she said.

The mighty and the glamorous were by no means excluded from these rebuffs. In 1970 the producer of Love Story, Robert Evans, and its star, his wife Ali MacGraw, flew to London to attend the Royal Command Performance in the presence of HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and HRH the Princess Margaret.

‘All of us stood in a receiving line as Lord Somebody introduced us, one by one, to Her Majesty and her younger daughter. It was a hell of a thrill, abruptly ending when the lovely princess shook my hand.

‘“Tony saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.”

‘“Fuck you too,” I said to myself, smiling back.’

It was almost as though, early in life, she had contracted a peculiarly royal form of Tourette’s Syndrome, causing the sufferer to be seized by the unstoppable urge to say the wrong thing. When the model Twiggy and her then boyfriend, Justin de Villeneuve, were invited to dinner by the Marquis and Marchioness of Dufferin in the 1960s, their hostess warned them that Princess Margaret would be among the guests. Before the royal arrival, the marquis instructed them in royal protocol. ‘We were tipped off to stand if she stood, and to call her Ma’am. Fine, no probs,’ recalled de Villeneuve.

Sitting close to the Princess, de Villeneuve was shocked to find that her smoking was seamless. ‘When we started to eat, she lit a ciggie and then continued to chainsmoke, lighting one ciggie off another, throughout the meal. Where’s the protocol in that?’

The Princess ignored Twiggy – at that time one of the most famous women in Britain – until the very last moment. She then turned and asked her what her name was.

‘Lesley, Ma’am. But my friends call me Twiggy.’

‘How unfortunate,’ replied the Princess, and turned her back on her once more.

At this point, Lord Snowdon, never the most loyal husband, leaned over towards de Villeneuve. ‘You will get this with the upper classes,’ he sighed.

‘Well, I think it’s a charming name,’ chipped in the Marquis of Dufferin.

* Often known as ‘The Climbing Rose’.

The Princess liked to one-up. I have heard from a variety of people that she would engineer the conversation around to the subject of children’s first words, asking each of her fellow guests what their own child’s first words had been. Having listened to responses like ‘Mama’ and ‘doggy’, she would say, ‘My boy’s first word was “chandelier”.’

But her strong competitive streak was not always matched by ability. A regular fellow guest recalled one particular fit of bad sportsmanship. ‘We were playing Trivial Pursuit, and the question was the name of a curried soup. She said, “It’s just called curried soup. There isn’t any other name for it. It’s curried soup!” Our host said, “No, Ma’am – the answer is ‘Mulligatawny’.” And she said, “No – it’s curried soup!” And she got so furious that she tossed the whole board in the air, sending all the pieces flying everywhere.’

Her snappiness was instinctive and unstoppable, like a nervous twitch. ‘I hear you’ve completely ruined my mother’s old home,’ she said to the architect husband of an old friend who had been working on Glamis Castle. To the same man, who had been disabled since childhood, she said, ‘Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and seen the way you walk?’ Her more sympathetic friends managed to overlook such cruel remarks, believing them to be almost involuntary, or at least misguided. ‘I think she was trying to be cheeky. She thought she was trying to reach a kind of intimacy,’ says one. ‘But she suffered from a perpetual identity crisis. She didn’t know who she was. She never knew whether she was meant to be posh or to be matey, and so she swung between the two, and it was a disaster.’

In the 1990s, two senior representatives from Sotheby’s, one tall and thin, the other rather more portly, came to Kensington Palace to assess her valuables. The Princess asked them what they thought.

‘Well –’ began the tall man.

‘No, not you – the fat one,’ snapped the Princess.

The rebuke became her calling card, like Frank Ifield’s yodel or Tommy Cooper’s fez. Who wanted to sit through her analysis of current affairs, or her views on twentieth-century literature? No one: the connoisseurs wanted to see her getting uppity; it was what she did best. If you were after perfect manners, an early night and everything running like clockwork, then her sister would oblige. But if you were in search of an amusing tale with which to entertain your friends, you’d opt for the immersive Margaret experience: a late night and a show of stroppiness, all ready to jot down in your diary the moment she left, her high-handedness transformed, as if by magic, into anecdote.

Hoity-toity is what was wanted. For most recipients, hosts and guests alike, it was part of a package deal: once she had finally gone and the dust had settled, they were left with a suitably outrageous story – the ungracious royal! the bad Princess! – to last a lifetime. She had a small circle of lifelong friends, loyal to the last. Though they forgave her faults, they also liked to store them up, ready for repetition to others less loyal. ‘Princess Margaret’s friends are devoted to her,’ wrote A.N. Wilson in 1993. ‘But one seldom meets any of them after they have had the Princess to stay, without hearing a tale of woe – how she has kept the company up until four in the morning (it is supposedly not allowed to withdraw from a room until a royal personage has done so); or insisted on winning at parlour games, even those such as Trivial Pursuit which require a degree of knowledge which she simply did not possess; how she has expected her hostess to act as a lady-in-waiting, drawing back the curtains in the morning, and so forth.’

Ever discreet, Kenneth Rose would amuse his friends with the tale of the vintage Madeira (‘Exactly like petrol!’), but would bide his time before putting it into print, for fear of losing his friendship with the Princess. His oleaginous discretion was assured, and this was how he remained a frequent visitor to Kensington Palace. This discretion extended to the moment of Princess Margaret’s death, at which point he employed the anecdote to lend spice to her obituary in the Sunday Telegraph. Her death unleashed many such tales, rising like so many phoenixes from the ashes. For instance, in a diary for the New Statesman, the comedian John Fortune recalled an encounter with her at the BBC Television Centre in the early seventies.

First, he introduced her to his producer, Denis Main Wilson. ‘She asked him what he did. He stood up very straight and said: “Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part.” The Princess replied: “Isn’t that that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?”

‘After a few more minutes of conversation, I found myself saying: “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you, Princess Margaret, but I have someone waiting for me downstairs and I have to go.”

‘She fixed me with a beady look. “No you don’t,” she said. “No one leaves my presence until I give them permission to do so.”’

But, for all her haughtiness, Fortune detected ‘a look of mischief in her eyes’. ‘At that moment, I knew she didn’t mean it. Had she, perhaps, been waiting all her life for someone to tell her they had to go?’

Fortune felt that if he had replied, ‘Well, that’s too bad, I’m off anyway,’ then nothing would have happened. But he wasn’t prepared to take the risk. A formal conversation continued for a few more minutes, and then she said, ‘I’m very bored here. Isn’t there somewhere else in this place we can go and have a drink?’

He knew of a bar in Light Entertainment that stayed open late, so he raced down two floors, only to find the barman pulling the metal grille down. ‘“Stop, stop,” I cried, “open up again. Quick, Princess Margaret is coming.”’

‘Pull the other one …’ said the sceptical barman.

At that moment they saw what Fortune described as ‘the pocket battleship’ bearing down on them.

Fortune ordered two gin and tonics, one for himself and one for Princess Margaret. He then spotted a director of The Old Grey Whistle Test slumped against the bar, so he presented him to the Princess. ‘I think he must have been Australian, because within minutes the talk was of Sydney Harbour, convicts and the penalties for stealing a loaf of bread in the eighteenth century.

‘And what made it perfect,’ enthused the Princess, not getting the point of the story, ‘was that it was STALE bread!’ Within minutes, Fortune had made his excuses and left.

Throughout her adult life, Princess Margaret was happy to be tempted away from her solid bedrock of tweedy friends towards the more glittering world of bohemia. She leaned towards the artistic, the camp and the modish, even going so far as to marry a man at the centre of that particular Venn diagram. Her royal presence was enough to gratify the snobbish tendencies of the bohemians, while her snooty behaviour let them laugh at her behind her back, thus exonerating themselves from the charge of social climbing. Hers was a name to drop, generally to the sound of a tut-tut or a titter.

(Popperfoto/Getty Images)

The Princess was drawn to theatrical types, and they to her; they detected something camp in her, something of the pantomime dame, some element of irony in the way she adopted her royal airs, as though with a wink and a nudge she might at any moment reveal her haughty persona to have been no more than a theatrical tease. She enjoyed playing with the boundaries of being royal, popping out from under the red silk rope, and then, just as abruptly, popping back beneath it, returning to her familiar world of starch and vinegar. The Princess would draw bohemians to her with a smoky, nightclub worldliness, mischievously at odds with her position. Then, having enticed them in and helped them loosen up, she would suddenly and without warning snap at them, making it clear that by attempting to engage with her on equal terms they were guilty of a monstrous presumption.

A keen theatregoer, she went to see Derek Jacobi as Richard II at the Phoenix Theatre in 1988, sending word asking him to remain onstage at the end of the performance, so that she could meet him.

‘I did, and she kept me waiting,’ he remembered. ‘She had gone to hospitality, had a couple of whiskies, and then tottered through to say hello onstage half an hour later.’

After another show, she invited him to dine with her and some ballet friends at Joe Allen’s restaurant in Covent Garden. ‘There were eight of us and I sat next to her. She smoked continuously, not even putting out her cigarette when the soup arrived, but instead leaning it up against the ashtray. We got on terribly well, very chummy, talking about her mum and her sister, and she really made me feel like I was a friend, until she got a cigarette out and I picked up a lighter and she snatched it out of my hand and gave it to a ballet dancer called David Wall.

‘“You don’t light my cigarette, dear. Oh no, you’re not that close.”’

Bohemian society in sixties London was formed of an unresolved mix of egalitarianism and snobbery. Kenneth Tynan was as devoted to Princess Margaret as he was to the British working class, though he took care to keep the two enthusiasms separate. Tracy Tynan remembers her father arguing that her birthday party should be postponed because Princess Margaret would be out of town. But her presence at his arty get-togethers was unsettling. An actress who was sometimes a guest told me that the assembled iconoclasts – actors, writers, artists, musicians – would kowtow to Her Royal Highness while she was present, only to make fun of her the moment she left, imitating her squeaky, high-pitched voice, her general ignorance, her cackhanded opinions, her lofty putdowns, her air of entitlement. If a fellow guest’s over-familiarity had prompted her to execute one of her ‘Off with his head!’ reprimands, then they would have something extra to giggle about. The presence of the Princess would endow a party with grandeur; her departure would be the signal for mimicry to commence. Beside these laughing sophisticates, the Princess could often appear an innocent.

The baby had been expected any time between 6 and 12 August 1930. The mother, HRH the Duchess of York, planned to give birth to this, her second child, at her family seat, Glamis Castle. This was disappointing news for the home secretary, J.R. Clynes, who had been looking forward to a family holiday in Brighton in the first weeks of August. A socialist who had started work in a cotton mill at the age of ten, Clynes now found himself bound by law to be at hand for the royal birth.

Some had suggested that Clynes could make a last-minute dash from London to Scotland the moment news of the first contractions came through, but his stuffy ceremonial secretary, Harry Boyd, was having none of it: if the birth was not properly witnessed by the home secretary, then the baby’s relatively high place in the line of succession – third for a boy, fourth for a girl – would be placed in jeopardy. Nothing should be left to chance.

So, like it or not, Boyd and Clynes boarded the train to Scotland in good time, arriving at Cortachy Castle, where they would be staying, promptly on the morning of 5 August. A special telephone wire had been installed from Glamis to Cortachy, with a dispatch rider at hand in case the wire broke down.

The two men were to have a long wait. Clynes, quiet and retiring, occupied his time with long walks, sometimes in the company of his hostess, Lady Airlie. Boyd, on the other hand, was more worked-up; he preferred to stay indoors, fearful lest he miss the vital phone call. Nor did he rule out the possibility of an accident, or some sort of muddle-up, or even sabotage. Had he spent too long out East? ‘I could not help feeling that his long residence in China was inclining him to view the situation in too oriental a light,’ Lady Airlie recalled in her memoirs.

On the 11th, the three of them – the home secretary, the countess, the civil servant – were on red alert, sitting up all night, ‘sustained by frequent cups of coffee’, but it was a false alarm. On the 14th, Boyd lost his temper when Clynes said he was thinking of going sightseeing with Lady Airlie; on the morning of the 21st, ‘wild-eyed and haggard after sitting up all night’, Boyd telephoned Glamis for any news, and was told there was none. Unable to contain his nerves, he stomped out into the garden and started kicking stones.

That same evening, just as they were dressing for dinner, the call from Glamis at last came through. Boyd, wearing only a blue kimono, a souvenir from his China days, was caught on the hop. ‘What? In an hour? We must start at once!’ With that, he leapt into his suit and rushed downstairs, where he found Clynes already waiting in his coat and Homburg. ‘Just look at that, Boyd!’ said Clynes, pointing to the sunset. ‘In such a night stood Dido …’ But Boyd was in no mood for an impromptu Shakespeare recital, and pushed Clynes headlong into the waiting car.

They arrived at Glamis with barely half an hour to spare. At 9.22 p.m., attended by her three doctors, the Duchess gave birth to a baby girl. Once the baby had been weighed (6lbs 3oz), the home secretary was ushered into the bedroom to bear witness. ‘I found crowded round the baby’s cot the Duke of York, Lord and Lady Strathmore and Lady Rose Leveson-Gower, the Duchess’s sister. They at once made way for me, and I went to the cot and peeping in saw a fine chubby-faced little girl lying wide awake.’

The news that the King had another grandchild – his fourth – was greeted with forty-one-gun salutes from the Royal Horse Artillery in both Hyde Park and the Tower of London, together with the ringing of the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. The following evening, 4,000 people gathered in the Glamis village square and followed the Glamis Pipe Band up Hunter’s Hill as it played boisterous renditions of ‘The Duke of York’s Welcome’, ‘Highland Laddie’ and ‘The Earl of Strathmore’s Welcome’. With everyone gathered at the summit, two young villagers lit a six-hundred-foot-high brushwood beacon. Within minutes, its flames could be seen from miles around.

Princess Margaret was born in 1930, the same year as air hostess and newscaster entered the language, and died in 2002, when googling, selfie, blogger and weapons of mass destruction first appeared.

Is it just me, or do a remarkably high proportion of the words that share her birthday also reflect something of her character? Blasé first made the Channel crossing in 1930, subtly altering its meaning on the way: in its home country of France, it meant ‘sated by enjoyment’, while here in Britain it meant something closer to ‘bored or unimpressed through over-familiarity’. Also from France, or eighteenth-century France, came negligée, with that extra ‘e’ to show that it now meant a lacy, sexy dressing gown rather than an informal gown worn by men and women alike.

Inventions that first came on the market in 1930, thus introducing new words to the language, included bulldozer, electric blanket and jingle, all of which have a faint echo of Margaret about them. The Gibson – a martini-like cocktail consisting of gin and vermouth with a cocktail onion – was introduced to fashionable society. In All About Eve (1950), Bette Davis serves her guests Gibsons, saying, ‘Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.’

Then again, learner-driver, washing-up machine and snack bar also came into being in 1930, yet it’s hard to relate any of them to Princess Margaret, who never learned to drive, nor to operate a washing-up machine. And, as far as I know, she never entered a snack bar.

Also making their first entries that year were to bale out, meaning to make an emergency parachute jump, to feel up, meaning to grope or fondle, and sick-making, meaning to make one either feel queasy, or vomit, depending on the force of one’s reaction. Each of these three has something Margaret-ish about it, as do crooner and eye shadow and the adjective luxury.

Two concepts dear to any biographer, but perhaps particularly dear to biographers of Princess Margaret, entered the language in the year of her birth: guesstimate and whodunnit.

There also came a word that had been around for several centuries, but which, as a direct result of the birth of the little Princess in 1930, was to take on a life of its own.

Horoscope.

At his office in Fleet Street, John Gordon, the editor of the Sunday Express, was struggling to come up with a fresh angle on the news of another royal birth. Then it came to him: why not ask Cheiro,* the most famous astrologer of the day, to predict what life might have in store for her? Cheiro had, in his time, given personal readings to, among others, Oscar Wilde, General Kitchener, Mark Twain and King Edward VII. The little Princess would surely be a doddle.

Gordon telephoned Cheiro’s office, only to be informed by his assistant, R.H. Naylor, that the great man was unavailable. Instead, Naylor put himself forward for the task. His article, ‘What the Stars Foretell for the New Princess’, duly appeared the following Sunday.

Naylor foretold that Princess Margaret Rose would have ‘an eventful life’, a prediction that was possibly on the safe side, since few lives are without any event whatsoever. Moreover, it would be decades before anyone could confidently declare it to have been entirely uneventful, and by that time people’s minds would have been distracted by other, more eventful, things. More particularly, Naylor predicted that ‘events of tremendous importance to the Royal Family and the nation will come about near her seventh year’.

The article proved a huge success, so much so that Gordon proceeded to commission Naylor to write forecasts for the months ahead. As luck – or chance, or fate – would have it, one of his predictions was that ‘a British aircraft will be in danger between October 8th and 15th’. He was just three days out: on 5 October, on its maiden overseas flight, the passenger airship R101 crashed in Beauvais, France, killing forty-eight of the fifty-four people on board.

Naylor’s reputation was made. John Gordon now hit on the idea of asking him to write a weekly column making predictions for all Sunday Express readers according to their birthdays. Naylor puzzled for some time over how to incorporate 365 different forecasts into a single column, and eventually devised a more off-the-peg system by dividing the sun’s 360-degree transit into twelve zones, each of them spanning thirty degrees. He then named each of the twelve zones after a different celestial constellation, and offered blocks of predictions for each birth sign. This was how the modern horoscope came into being.

In the Princess’s seventh year, 1936, a series of events of tremendous significance to the Royal Family did indeed come about, exactly as predicted: the death of King George V, the abdication of King Edward VIII, and the accession of King George VI. Small wonder that Naylor was now regarded as something of a genius; before long he was receiving up to 28,000 letters a week from his bedazzled readers, anxious to know what fate had up its sleeve for them.

By now, every other popular newspaper had taken to employing a resident astrologer; according to Mass-Observation, ‘nearly two-thirds of the adult population glance at or read some astrological feature more or less regularly’.

One of the beauties of the horoscope, from the point of view of the astrologer, is that its followers are more than willing to forget or ignore any prediction that turns out to be wrong. In future, Naylor would be the beneficiary of this impulse to turn a blind eye. At the beginning of 1939, for instance, he confidently declared that ‘Hitler’s horoscope is not a war horoscope … if and when war comes, not he but others will strike the first blow.’ He also pinpointed the likely danger areas as ‘the Mediterranean, the Near East and Ireland’. Furthermore, he declared that the causes of any potential conflict would be: ‘1) The childless marriage; 2) The failure of agriculturalists … to understand the ways of nature and conserve the fertility of the soil.’

Within months, all these predictions had gone awry, but Naylor’s reputation remained rock-solid. Nearly ninety years on, the horoscope is quite possibly the most formidable legacy of HRH the Princess Margaret, who shared her birthday, 21 August, and her star sign Leo, with a varied list of famous characters, including Count Basie, King William IV, Kenny Rogers, Aubrey Beardsley, Dame Janet Baker and Joe Strummer of the Clash.

* Born William John Warner (1866–1936), he also went by the name of Count Louis Hamon. Cheiro combined his careers as a clairvoyant, numerologist and palmist with running both a champagne business and a chemical factory, though not from the same premises.

In my biographer’s delirium, as I looked at the list of Princess Margaret’s fellow 21 August Leos I began to notice spooky similarities, and then to think that, actually, she was just like them in every way: after all, King William IV was family, and Dame Janet Baker looked a bit like her, as well as being a near-contemporary (b.1933). The two of them were chummy, too: Dame Janet remembers the Princess saying, ‘Good luck, Janet – be an angel,’ to her before she sang the part of the Angel in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius in Westminster Abbey. Moreover, the Princess was a great fan of Count Basie, and vice versa: in 1957 Basie and his orchestra recorded ‘H.R.H.’, a song dedicated to her. Margaret also shared a louche, camp, decadent streak with Aubrey Beardsley, and might have identified with Kenny Rogers’ songs about being disappointed by love: ‘You picked a fine time to leave me, Tony’. And as for Joe Strummer, if the Margaret/Townsend romance were to be set to music, could there ever be a more perfect keynote duet than this?

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