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

Book Review: Redeeming Features by Nicky Haslam: Joy of being souffléed alive

Seasoned Arcatistes will know that I am not given to incontinent praise. So when I say that Nicky Haslam's memoir Redeeming Features is the most brilliantly trivial book I have ever read (since the Andy Warhol Diaries) you may need to pause and take a deep breath. Yes, you have my permission not to work for the rest of the day. By all means have sex. At least buy a good champagne.

Redeeming Features is the book Proust might have written had he not literary talent - his curse I'm afraid - or the book Duncan Fallowell might have penned had he not a brain or Oscar Wilde might have dashed off had he not a sense of humour. This is not to say that Nicky lacks literary talent or brains. Or a sense of humour. It is that he has neither (nor the sense of humour) in sufficient quantity to get in the way. His naked magnetism to society and celebrity figures is pure, romantic, child-like: nothing takes priority over his natal desire to nurture intimacies that are worth it.

A reader of average intelligence, and with an above average interest in names (obscure upper class aristo satellites, especially) will find their own delight unchallenged by artistic soul delving, behavioural over-noticing or mere satire. Many a memoir is utterly ruined by the simple inability of the author to maintain the consistency of a soufflé in matters entirely inconsequential. Nicky avoids this. He rises to the occasion all puffed up like a pillow, his named crowns golden, and with a yielding middle bit: yes, he did have a romance with Tony Armstrong-Jones. Redeeming Features is that scrummy.

In keeping with the frothy nature of the book it would be unseemly then to try to paraphrase his tale: it matters only that he is here and the book is there. To say more would be to ruin the effect, to puncture the soufflé. Light things, such as a joke, cannot bear to be named or explained. To write a book which is just there is a high accomplishment: it is an act of witting or unwitting humility. I can't say better than that.

Like all good books, Redeeming Features hosts a mystery. On p283, Nicky writes of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll "meeting a supposed sex-change relative." Of this encounter he recalls once writing in the defunct magazine Ritz: "With a song in her heart, Marg beheld an adorable face. It may be a her to you and me, but it sure is a him to Her Grace." I can't imagine why the "supposed sex-change" is not named but if he means who I think he means he should know she's highly litigious. And she's no sex-change.

Lady Colin Campbell returns with Empress Bianca

Lady Colin Campbell

Fans of Lady Colin Campbell - Georgie to her friends - will be delighted to learn that her novel Empress Bianca is to be republished in September by Dynasty Press. You may recall that one the world's wealthiest women, Lily Safra, got the book pulped in its Arcadia incarnation following her claim that the novel's principal character, a "socially scheming double murderess", was based on her - fiction can so easily be confused with fact in certain less rigorous minds. Following a legal settlement Lady C made a number of "trivial" changes to the text and now we await the blockbuster once again. To order a copy click here. For background on Safra's lawsuit, click here.

Perhaps author Michael Gross will take comfort from this episode as he tussles with Annette de la Renta in New York over his marvellous book Rogues' Gallery.

Lady Colin Campbell decides to be merciful

Thank goodness Lady Colin Campbell has accepted ES Mag's apology for wrongly calling her a transsexual about a fortnight ago - see labels. My public appeal to Georgie - as we friends of Lady Colin call her - probably helped prevent litigation that could have proven to be costly for the supplement dedicated to the eugenics of wealth and status.

Madame Arcati. Lady Colin Campbell to sue? Nicky Haslam snogged by a paedo?

Yes, I am back. My announcement last week of this blog's cessation was a rehearsal of death: I think it most important sometimes to live through an experience for a better understanding of oneself and others, don't you think? I now have a better sense of what it will be like when I am no longer here: I felt your pain, your loss; while I felt utterly free. It's a kind of Method living. Immersing oneself in the alternative visceral as a preparation for the real thing: for the imagination is no substitute. Thank you for taking part in my experiment. You did not disappoint me. Bitches. Now I have things to report ....

Lady Colin Campbell

I do hope Lady Colin Campbell - she allows me to call her Georgie - is not about to sue the estimable ES Magazine, the supplement to the London Evening Standard. In its briefing report on the mega-rich Lily Safra - who effectively injuncted Georgie's marvellous novel Empress Bianca on the grounds of possible libel - it describes Lady Colin as the "transsexual novelist". Oh dear, dear. No! Georgie is not a transsexual and over the years has collected quite a tidy sum in court pay-outs and other settlements. Georgie was merely born with some tiny biological anomaly now sorted out: she's all woman I can tell you.

But I beg Georgie not to sue ES. It is generally peopled by immature, inexperienced know-nothings who have rich daddies and mummies and they're employed just for their contacts and for their aura which the commoners hope is contagious. Show pity on these pathetic specimens who think only of dosh and what's posh. Settle for an apology and show how big you can be, Georgie. See, I have a heart.

Nicky Haslam

Now to Nicky Haslam. In the September edition of Vanity Fair, in which he grants a lengthy, deeply comic interview about his life, it is claimed that his memoirs, Redeeming Features, will be published by Knopf in October 2009. Is this really true? There's nothing to this effect on Amazon.com. Weidenfeld still claims on Amazon to be publishing Writing On The Wall in October (as a US import from the UK). I am very confused. Perhaps a know-all could advise. But Redeeming Features must exist because the VF writer appears to have read it.

In the interview Nicky portrays himself as a post-War Dorian Gray, a "devastatingly beautiful" young man who seduced, or was seduced by, Lord Henry Woottons all over the place. Early photos do not entirely bear out his self-appraisal: to be frank, the arrangement of his jaw, in particular, puts in mind more a fresh-faced Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall - the mouth area seemingly paralysed by a million strangulated vowels.

Perhaps his most troubling anecdote has to do with a certain tutor he had as a child who used to "gently" snog him. No age is given for this initiation but he must have been pre-pubertal. "The physical nature never went beyond kissing" claims Nicky. Yet is it too much to conjecture that the tutor might have experienced an erection while kissing the little boy and walked out of Nicky's house with a tent in his crotch before a bout of furious wanking? I think Rebekah Wade may need to take a retrospective interest in this abuse. But among the upper classes such an aberration is plainly tolerated while the tabloids strike poses of horror.

Nicky has never much cared for sex: he is I think a romantic. But do read the interview. It's far superior to that embarrassing Madonna interview VF ran earlier in the year. The writer of that must have thought he was in the running for the Pulitzer now that Norman's dead. There's too much big literary cockedness about.

The Future
I shall not be updating as regularly as before; I may opt for occasional longer reports such as this if only to piss off internet surfers looking for nugget prose. Such busy loafers annoy me.