The Palace Papers, by Tina

Books

Right royal writers

Tina Brown is the latest in a long line of royal biographers. Hugo Vickers picks his favourites

Ihope 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 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?

Among recent ones, I relished Jane Ridley’s admirably researched George V: Never a Dull Moment. Ridley brought into play unusual sources such as Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, and obscure ones such as Sir Richard Molyneux and Sir Bryan Godley-Fawcett, to good advantage.

I find Robert Hardman’s latest Queen suitably upbeat. He relies to a large extent, though not entirely, on personal interviews with distinguished sources, and he too sometimes delves into an unusual source. He makes me keen to explore the diaries of Cynthia Gladwyn. The published ones were good – so I bet the unpublished ones would be a feast.

Among earlier ones, my favourite remains James Pope-Hennessy’s Queen Mary (1959), in which he proves that an authorised biography does not have to be a dull and plodding volume. His subtle turn of phrase and his judicious quotes paint a superb portrait of the Queen’s grandmother. It was a considerable joy to look behind the scenes and see how he created it when editing The Quest for Queen Mary (2018).

My favourite line from the biography is Lord Clarendon’s comment on the marriage prospects of the enormously fat Princess Mary Adelaide (Queen Mary’s Princess (2000). He has an enjoyable style. A bit like Alan Clark with Mrs Thatcher, there is a sense that when she falls, he falls too. In Jephson’s case, he bailed out after the Martin Bashir interview on Panorama.

Then there are the many books that arguably should not have been written. The horrors are those that have been cobbled together from secondary sources, and those that aim to destroy reputations. I would urge considerable caution in reading Andrew Lownie’s Traitor King, in which he throws in every hostile source to blacken the Duke of Windsor’s name.

In a recent television documentary, he even suggested that the Duke wanted the Nazis to bomb Buckingham Palace and by implication kill his brother, King George VI, so that he could return to Britain as a Nazi king.

Since there is a mass of evidence that, from his days as Prince of Wales, the Duke longed to escape the throne, this is ludicrous.

mother): ‘No German prince will venture on so vast an undertaking.’

The impoverished Duke of Teck rose to the challenge.

It is interesting that well-researched unauthorised biographies often overtake the official ones. Kenneth Rose was more informative on George V than Sir Harold Nicolson and John Gore put together. Sarah Bradford was very much better on George VI than Sir John Wheeler-Bennett.

Access is of course important. The Royal Archives are fabulous, but they are not the only place where the stories lie hidden.

It is impossible to write a boring book on Queen Victoria, and there is a good shelf to choose from. Hard to make a choice but, for a good impression of her life at court, Ask Sir James (1987) – based on the diaries of her doctor, Sir James Reid (Richard Ingrams’s grandfather) – is unputdownable.

Back at school, I got my hands on Sir Frederick Ponsonby’s Recollections of Three Reigns (1957). It was full of stories about Queen Victoria, Edward VII and George V.

And, sticking my neck out, I believe that Patrick Jephson (her private secretary, much criticised for bursting into print) gave us the best portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales in Shadows of a Hugo Vickers is the author of biographies of Queen Mary, the Queen Mother and the Duchess of Windsor

Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers is published by Century (£20)