Lady Colin Campbell, Kitty Kelley and the truth about Queen's birth story

Lady Colin Campbell in a Windsor sandwich

It gives me great pleasure to bring to your attention the latest work of Lady Colin Campbell ('Georgie' to her friends) - The Untold Story of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

Dynasty Press is its publisher (and of which she is a director); and because Lady Colin is a notable figure, she can look forward to heaps of publicity.

On which last point my attention is drawn to the Daily Mail. Earlier this month, the paper whipped up a little fuss over Lady Colin's claim in her book that the Queen and Princess Margaret were conceived by artificial insemination. The story was told with a faint tremor of the shock-horrors, as if the idea had been dreamt up in someone's pretty head for the first time.

In fact this tale made its debut abroad back in 1997, in Kitty Kelley's still-banned book The Royals. I have a copy of it which the late Sheridan Morley illegally secreted to me in a brown paper wrap. On page 23, darling Kitty - a true digger of gilt-coated dirt - relates that the Duke of York could not impregnate his wife - the Duchess (later the Queen Mum) is quoted as joking, 'The Duke is not heir-conditioned.'

Alas his brother, the sometime King Edward VIII (aka David; and Duke of Windsor), also suffered from the condition attributed to 'nervousness' or 'a slight problem with his... willy.'

Kitty writes: 'Finally, on the advice of her [the Duchess'] doctor, Lane Phillips, she and her husband submitted to the unorthodox science of artificial insemination. The arduous procedure of mechanically injecting his sperm into her uterus finally enabled her to get pregnant.'

As to the many other claims in Lady Colin's book (the Mail is a good starting point, click here), I cannot comment; though it is well to remember that she anticipated quite a number of Andrew Morton's tales about Diana and Charles in the early '90s. I recall that a few of the more craven and pathetic royal hagiographers denounced Lady Colin then as they do now as a fantasist.

What people won't say or do to put bread on the table.

The Untold Story of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother - to buy click here

Jubilee, 1977: Borgia Ginz reborn as Simon Cowell, and other comings

I do hope Derek Jarman's Jubilee figures peripherally large in the Diamond Jubilee celebrations. Released in 1977 in response to the Silver Jubilee, it body-snatched Punk in its depiction of sleep-walking UK, and today still looks more thematically contemporary than anything else listed on Imdb.com, if you're seeking a celluloid facsimile of street and cultural realities.

Is not Borgia Ginz (played sublimely by Jack Birkett), who sneers that people forgot to lead their lives as they 'watched my endless movie', our very own Simon Cowell-Rupert Murdoch cross-breed media magnate pop mogul?

'I sucked, and I sucked and I sucked....'

In the movie, Queen Elizabeth I time-travels 400 years into the latter part of the 20th Century on the 'wings' of Ariel, summoned up by astrologer John Dee. But enough explication. I don't want to ruin it. It is by far the best British movie ever. And that's it.

A taste of things to come....



Borgia's gospel according to Simon Cowell....

David Starkey: If only Queen Elizabeth I had been black....

I'm sorry to see that 'historian' Dr David Starkey is in the Twitter stocks for his metaphorisation of black skin for criminality. His problem is that he has never to my knowledge written a history of a black homicidal maniac. If only Elizabeth I or her dad Henry VIII - his favourite book and TV topics - had been black he might now be metaphorising white skin for criminality: strange how chance, circumstance and schooling play a part in our avowed certainties and comforts.

Instead, like many other 'historians' before him, he has taken to identify with his lucrative subjects and even to adopt a prose style which could be mistaken for Tudorbethan pastiche. Some intellectual crossdressers go the whole hog and end up on pub stage as Madame Trollette to the joy of many. Others, merely write books and cultivate a persona that requires no wig or nail technician.

Dr Starkey has only to open his mouth and I see the Spanish Armada yonder.

Horney in Australia: Dealing with the Down Under

I think the UK ignored the Arcati tale about London publishers bidding for Australia fundraiser queen Marie Sutton's Princess Diana letters, but someone called Andrew Horney (great name) on the Sydney Morning Herald picked it up. The Horney didn't credit the source, but I'll set him an example and link Horney here. Do watch it, it could prove instructive. It contains a universal message. I'm all heart, ain't I?

The Tina Brown Chronicles? Not today, thank you

Writer Walter Ellis reveals to Arcati that Tina Brown is happy to delve into Diana's entrails but is less keen to allow others to delve into hers and Harry's ....

"A few years ago, while at a low ebb, I approached Ms Brown in New York to ask if she would consider assisting in a biography of her and her husband, the Blessed Harry, that, Gawd help me, I thought might pay the rent for six months. She did not reply. Her secretary at Talk magazine did, however, email me to say that la Brown was resolutely opposed to any such biography and would instruct her friends to render no assistance. Happily for her, friends of the Princess of Wales presented no comparable obstruction, and today, having pocketed a million pounds plus for telling the untold story of Diana (again), Ms Brown is free to concentrate on the awesome material of her own life. I Iook forward to the result and hereby authorise her to use the above material in whatever manner she considers appropriate."

The Diana Chronicles: judging it by its cover

Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles arrives in the post. For review purposes, my interest is less in the story therein and how Brown tells it than in the book’s physicality and presentation. As Arcati readers know, I’m of the firm view that some books can be judged by their cover (and the few explicatory pages within that bookend the main text), and Tina’s is one of them.

What hits you first is the shocking or neon pink (or kinky pink) cover: it’s a colour screamer intended to draw the feminine eye. My first impression on sight of the book was of Diana as a large lobster boiled to death. This is a woman’s tale to which fellow women will be drawn. But so garish is it that one instantly suspects a little over-compensation for something. That something – or someone – could be Tina Brown herself.

She is not famous as a writer as such beyond some smarty-pants celebrity profiles of yesteryear: media followers know her as the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and the ill-fated Talk. Hers is a hard, clever image - not the stuff of non-fiction bestsellerdom. She has a reputation for a modish, magpie use of shiny word finds, as if the employment of the latest now-word or phrase shifts her into the symphonic moment: she is the uber-literate version of the virtually illiterate US Vogue editor Anna Wintour. One may do words and the other frocks but both do zeitgeist with a vengeance. If that’s dust you see, it’s their wake as they hurtle to the next next reason for their vampiric greater glory.

So Tina was not an obvious choice to write this book. Reverse the book and the pink is vitiated a little by text in black, white and gold. Helen Mirren’s testimonial is a smart touch: to Americans especially she now is the democratic embodiment of the Queen from the movie of that name in which she starred. One might suppose at a subconscious level that Her Maj has licensed this book, so to speak, given it royal assent. To state this is to sound silly yet Mirren’s slightly too well-written words are not here by accident. It’s a soft irony that will amuse the wise and delight the sweet hearted.

Brown’s portrait is a thing of wonder: art critic Brian Sewell must be summoned to pass judgement. Such is the extent of the recreation from the palette of contrasting pastels that for a moment I thought that Kristin Scott Thomas had posed as a stand-in, but it serves the purpose of pictorially complementing the shocking pink. Tina Brown is now a blockbuster author, the photo is telling us, “and I’m not 53.” It is pure Danielle Steel glitz. Photographer Annie Liebovitz – a Tina Brown recruitee at VF – has done a splendid job. She’ll go far.

Now, another surprise. Shocking pink might suggest that we’re in for a simplistic, sensational or exclamatory tale of fluffy, womanly things. Yet on opening the book, the type and layouts reveal a severe masculine side. The print is scholarly small and the acknowledgements runs to eight pages – she spoke to over 250 people for the book. It could be a biography by Richard Ellmann. At the back there’s a substantial bibliography and notes (per chapter). There’s even a lengthy index. This is a serious biography, after all. The shocking pink proves to be seductive but misleading. The colour will appeal to those who would not be drawn to a book with an interiority such as this. The interiority will appeal to those put off by the pink.

To the eye then it's a Jekyll & Hyde sort of book, wanting to have its cake and eat it - and there's nothing wrong in that. But a book with a split personality may not quite know what it really is - let's hope its readers can work that out for themselves.