Transformation of a princess into something rich and rare

Published on Thursday 15 June 2006 00:13

CAN it only have been last week that I despaired of World Cup cultural asphyxiation? How foolish. How utterly lacking in insight about those things which really stir the human pulse. Namely, "a vulgar Royal car boot sale" - as one paper announced yesterday.

The sale, of course, was at Christie's, London, and the boot in question apparently contained the late Princess Margaret's personal effects. The same princess whose early death in February 2002 was greeted in print by a then-broadsheet newspaper thus: "So the princess is dead. She will not be mourned, this princess, as other princesses have been mourned." The headline was: "Wilful, charming, grumpy and really badly-behaved."

Millions of words were lavished on Princess Margaret Rose's wayward life: her romances and her heartbreaks, her indulgences, her beauty, and the unfortunate cosmic schedule which delivered a headstrong, independent woman into an era which valued very different female traits. Astonishingly in terms of royal protocol, her will stipulated cremation, while the law stipulated that her estate was subject to normal inheritance tax, currently payable at 40 per cent of any amount in excess of 250,000. As Princess Margaret's estate was valued at 7.7 million, this left a significant figure for her heirs, Viscount Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto, to find for the tax man.

WAS the nation weeping at their plight? Probably not - though inheritance tax at a level which now makes a huge percentage of middle-class family homes automatically liable, does stir strong feelings; feelings which were probably more remote in the Seventies, when the first raft of Scotland's ancestral homes had to be sold off to pay death duties. Sadly, the heirs of Mr and Mrs McGillicuddy of Newmains or Milngavie cannot fall back on royal cachet to push up the valuation of the brass coal scuttle and dressing-table set which their children have sent to auction to help settle the estate's liabilities. There are no tiaras bought for just 5,000 (and estimated at 200,000) to yield them almost 1 million.

For, in death, Princess Margaret has effected the greatest pantomime transformation of them all. All those snide comments clearly accumulated over the years into something "rich and rare" indeed. The result for the businesslike Viscount Linley, who braved both his father's wrath and Buckingham Palace's embarrassment to stage this huge bonanza, is a vast profit - 9.6 million, when 3 million was estimated. Yet the tax man is not due one extra penny. Like the rest of us, the Inland Revenue rather under-estimated the price put on wayward glamour when it is combined with a royal title. This is the glamour which makes a gaudy scarlet stack of three huge rubies, assembled in a rakish tower, fetch 299,200 instead of 15,000.

BUT there is no need for the rest of us to get smug here. Very few families behave with exemplary restraint when there's an estate involved. Suddenly, everyone seems to recall a private conversation with the deceased in which they were promised all kinds of things. This was especially true of my Great Aunt Lois. She had married the sole heir to the Fison's estate in the Thirties, and set off on a lavish honeymoon cruise, during which the groom sadly expired. Lois returned to England a rather suspect widow with an enormous fortune which was promptly entailed - meaning she could spend as much as she wished while alive, barring remarriage, but she could bequeath nothing. I'll bet you can imagine how popular she became with relatives she had barely known previously.

When she died, some 40 years later, her splendid house in Brighton's Royal Terrace suffered the same fate depicted in the film Zorba the Greek, when the village floozie dies. Teams of frantic relatives and friends stripped it down to the damask silk wallpaper; each asserting a personal promise, and each arriving within a few hours - before the lawyers had sealed the property. We were blameless up here in Scotland (too long a car journey, and besides my father had always kept a Calvinistic distance from his extravagant aunt), but the tales of who grabbed what and who especially resented it tumbled through the family for decades.

"People behave badly where estates are concerned," my father assured me. And I believe it. Especially as I later discovered that when his younger brother won his Oxford scholarship, he was promised that he would later inherit his parents' wonderful library. For the rest of his life, he gave them only books as presents.