Books Right royal writers Tina Brown is the latest in a long line of royal biographers. Hugo Vickers picks his favourites
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hope I live long enough to see an explanatory note at the end of reviews – ‘This author ran off with my wife’; ‘I wanted to write this book but my publisher cancelled my contract.’ So I think it is only fair to declare my hand. I have known Tina Brown since 1979, and she was kind enough to give me a sumptuous dinner on my recent visit to New York, the table filled with fascinating movers and shakers. In 1981, I detect that the unctuous Kenneth Rose, the journalist and diarist, was faced with a similar dilemma when asked to review a life of the Queen Mother by Elizabeth Longford – for he lunched from time to time with the Longfords in the House of Lords. ‘It would be agreeable to record that such a perceptive biographer and steadfast friend had written an altogether exceptional work on so well-worn a theme,’ he wrote, ‘here a fresh anecdote, there a penetrating turn of phrase. The illustrations, too, are admirable.’ Tina Brown is an inspired editor, for which she received the CBE in 2000. Her network of friends and contacts is extensive. I have to confess – and I am sure that, as a professional editor, Tina will know what I mean by this – that I am not her target readership. I believe she sold over a million copies of her book The
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Diana Chronicles. Had she aimed this book at me, she would have sold only one. In The Palace Papers, she certainly fulfils the book’s blurb, in presenting a ‘tour de force journey through the scandals, love affairs, power plays and betrayals that have buffeted the monarchy over the last 25 years’. My problem is that I lived through all that, have read a lot about it, and find it hard to do so again. In many ways, the inner core of the Royal Family has settled into something rather positive – the households acting in unity, all of them protective and supportive of the Queen in her Platinum Jubilee year. When I watched the Cambridges arriving at Westminster Abbey for Prince Philip’s memorial service in March, I envisioned a more positive future than Tina predicts at the end of her book. ‘Will historians of the future,’ she asks, ‘consider the length of [the Queen’s] reign a fatal impediment to dynastic evolution, a pile-up of heirs and unresolved problems of minor royals who became casualties and roadkill?’ Her style emulates Jilly Cooper (who once gave us a line ‘He who pays the Piper-Heidsieck calls the tune’), or perhaps a breathless Joanna Lumley with an occasional sting in the tail. I came to enjoy her exaggerated
adjectives and to look out for them – Prince Charles wanted to make ‘an honest kedgeree’ of his mistress; Andrew Parker Bowles is ‘a walking pink gin’; Diana is ‘a sainted sylph’; Prince Andrew has a ‘boob-ogling pickup style’ and Robert Maxwell had ‘huge car-washbrush eyebrows.’ She must have had fun thinking those up. Where I found the book especially interesting was in her assessment of the Sussexes. Tina was also a first-hand witness to the Jeffrey Epstein saga – she was even menaced by him in her office. On that ongoing saga, she strikes me as spot-on. Had I been asked to proofread this book, I could have corrected many mistakes in styles and titles – including ‘Lady Anne Glenconner’ and ‘Lord Bernard Donoughue’ – but I guess this is written for those who do not care about such niceties. However, ‘The Dowager Duchess of Gloucestershire’ never existed (I know who she means). She needs to be careful with some. There is a Lady Rose Cholmondeley and there is a Marchioness of Cholmondeley. They are both called ‘Rose’. They are very different people: one a mature lady who loves the piano and another a young wife in a magnificent stately home. So what would be my choices for the best royal biographies?
