Mary Kenny
Princess Margaret The Netflix drama series The Crown, drawing, sometimes semi-fictitiously, on the private lives of the British royal family has been so successful that the BBC now plans to launch its own particular royal drama along similar lines.
This new drama will be about the lives and loves of Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth’s sister, who died in 2002.
And just to dress up their version of a royal soap opera, the Beeb has pretentiously announced that Margaret’s life is really an illumination of the sexual revolution and the times she lived through.
The high drama of Margaret’s life was her romance, at the age of 22, with a former World War II pilot, Group Captain Peter Townsend, who was freshly divorced and the father of two children. In October 1955, after widespread speculation and sensational splash headlines about her love-life, the Princess announced that she was renouncing Townsend. “Mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others,” she said.
I was a schoolgirl at Loreto College in Stephen’s Green the time, and I remember Mother Margaret Mary referring to the subject at an assembly a few years later, when Princess Margaret was due to marry Anthony Armstrong-Jones, subsequently Snowdon.
Maggie May, as we called the dear nun (a practical teacher who was an ace at imparting the rules of French grammar) said, meaningfully: “Princess Margaret will be happy. Because she has been GOOD.”
With the passage of time, I have learned that one should never make any final judgement of an event as it occurs. It is only with the perspective of history that the facts emerge.
It is not for me to judge Margaret, but the biographies which have been published tend to portray her as spoilt, selfish, arrogant, capricious and inconsiderate of the feelings of others. “Good” is not a word that often features.
The most recent biog, Craig Brown’s ‘Ma’am Darling – 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret’ gives some startling examples of her petulance and bad behaviour. And he comes to the conclusion that Margaret renounced Peter Townsend, in the end, because she would lose her royal privileges – and income. Brown doesn’t seem to think that Townsend behaved too honourably either.
Happiness
Princess Margaret did not find happiness in her eventual marriage to Lord Snowdon (half-brother of Birr’s Earl of Rosse) and I think we can imagine that the BBC will very probably lay some blame for her unhappiness on the Anglican Church for disbarring her marriage to a divorced man.
Peter Townsend subsequently remarried a young Belgian girl, Marie-Luce Jamagne, and had two more children. One of them became a Dominican priest who gave my son his First Communion.
A badge of honour
I like the new ‘Baby on Board’ badges that pregnant women are being encouraged to wear on public transport as a prompt to the public to offer expectant mothers a seat. It’s a point of respect, of consideration and of maternal health: it can be stressful, especially in the second half of pregnancy, to have to stand on public transport.
But I see that some public notices are now following the practice absurdly pioneered by London Transport, of referring to ‘pregnant people’, to maintain ‘gender-neutral’ language.
Look, folks, pregnancy is a function – and a privilege – of the female sex, in all mammalian species. And it is disrespecting woman’s unique capacity for bringing human life into the world by gender-neutralising the role.
Vulgar perhaps, but Trump is getting a lot right
Most people I know in Ireland and Britain deplore President Donald Trump [pictured] as an untrustworthy character, a vulgarian whose private conduct seems, at best, unedifying, and in his approach to illegal Mexican immigrants being separated from their children, cruel. I agree with many of these assessments. But, as some commentators have pointed out, Trump is not wrong about everything. And even where he is right, he is seldom given much credit – which isn’t fair either.
It was announced last week (by the reliable Atlanta Fed) that the American economy is due to grow by 4.6% or 4.8% this year.
Never, in recent history, have so many Americans been employed. Steelworkers in Pennsylvania, who were in despair about never being hired again, are back at work. Isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t it a positive move to relieve poverty by measures that provide work opportunities?
Reports in the anti-Trump New York Times are recognising that the turbulent internal politics of the White House have little impact on ordinary voters. In the states that got left behind by globalisation – and particularly by China’s ferociously aggressive trading practices – the basic question of whether a family can earn its living has far more resonance.
The TV commentator Andrew Neil predicts that President Trump will win a second term of office.