The Queen and the new Holocaust book

Much excitement today. The Queen has emerged from her Kleenex snot-igloo to attend church at Sandringham. The poor poppet. I don't catch colds any more by the simple policy of declining parties, especially around Yuletide and New Year. People only invite you to parties to give you their colds. They disguise the symptoms with Sudafed (other brands available). I know these things.

My point of course is that HM has demonstrated that she is still alive. A rumour was put out recently that she had passed away on account of her sneezing. Twitter got all excited while the rest of us slept. Suddenly a conspiracy was afoot. You can see how Holocaust deniers gain traction with their absurd claims and questions. Just say something and before long a moron will believe you as a symptom of her/his/its self-diagnosed illness-career.

Thinking of the Holocaust, may I draw your attention to a new book out next week. It's called Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1939-1949 by David Cesarani. It makes "extensive use of previously untapped resources such as diaries and letters from within the ghettos and camps (many of them in Polish or Yiddish and therefore previously largely inaccessible to Anglo-American scholars) and by adopting a rigorously Judeocentric approach the whole narrative of the march to genocide."

It appals me that Google has only lately started to act against anti-Semitic sites that peddle Holocaust denial, amending its algorithms so that neo-Nazi trash do not top the search. What's wrong with these bedroom-bound beards that run Google? Do they have some self-diagnosed illness-career we should know about?

Gorgeous! Princess Michael of Kent discusses 'dark shadows'!

Josephine Pembroke

All this fuss at The Oldie (the latest news is that Richard Ingrams has been locked out) reminds me that ages back I meant to blog about Josephine Pembroke and her online Radio Gorgeous. Josephine, who's about 50 but looks 36, is the wife of The Oldie's publisher, James. Radio Gorgeous is a station which discriminates against men by only featuring the lives and voices of females - arguably a not unreasonable editorial principle given millennia of misogynistic exclusion, Private Eye and cricket. A little correction is in order, surely.

Ever the swashbuckler, I, Madame Arcati - as female as you are lizard, in the Ickian sense - clamped headphones upon my head and decided to listen to the very first thing on Radio Gorgeous that I was drawn to; an example of Fate's Prodding. And who should I encounter there before I've drawn breath but Princess Michael of Kent! Josephine interviewed Princess Pushy on the occasion of the publication of her latest novel, The Queen of Four Kingdoms.

Her Royal Highness is certainly an authority on name-checking the crowned and titled stars of yore - a 'professor emeritus of history' fact-checks her books. In speech she accents foreign words, as if her tongue does the italic font. Rouen, for instance, emerges as 'Rrrooowahn' - I'm sure a media queen of etiquette has decreed that one should pronounce foreign terms in the usual English accent. But no matter.

Interest grows when she describes in pornographic detail the burning of Joan of Arc. Apparently she died of smoke inhalation not of actual burning - consumed by 'à petit feu, I was brought up speaking French, as you may know.' The executioner wore a leather apron. And a mask. Joan was chained to the post. Her corpse was properly burnt and the ashes thrown into the Seine as ghastly peasants screeched 'she's a boy!'

When later the princess talks of people's unreadable hand-writing, apropos Old French, Josephine laughs, 'My husband.'

We learn that the princess' blood group is A-positive - it's sweet and mosquitoes love it. However it may account for the arthritis she once had in her hands until a homoeopath 'cured' her by banning alcohol from her diet - she's not touched a drop in 13 years. Plus, she had hot wax baths which caused 'toxins [to come out] and they smell....' She always had dark shadows around her eyes like her kids because of smoking and drinking - but not now. She nags her dark shadowed children to give up these vices so that they, too, may display faces of unblemished light. But they ignore her. Freddie works for JP Morgan but one day will be a writer, like mummy.

Oh the details! Everything is framed in gilt, in luxe thinking and oneupmanship. The princess is rendered naked. I strongly urge TV channels and radio stations to hire Josephine Pembroke. This woman extracts the nitty-gritty. Like the princess, Josephine is 'well-organised.'

Listen to Princess Michael of Kent here. The interview gets more interesting after 44 minutes if you wish to jump and dodge the history.

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.

Hugo Vickers: Wallis' tragic tale, Higham and the 'Howling Cunt'

Hugo Vickers: Wally?

Most Esteemed Madame,

So happy to see your blog has returned.

I write to ask: have you perchance had an opportunity to peruse Mr Hugo Vickers' new work Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic Untold Story Of The Duchess Of Windsor? I'm half-way through and it is a most seriously curious work: more the tragic untold story of its author, who stalked his subject but was never fortunate enough to be granted an audience, and uses the book for a great deal of score-settling.

Author Michael Bloch gets it seriously in the neck, but I for one am left wondering why there is also no mention of Charles Higham whose Wallis bio contained equally racy allegations and was far more successful. Was it because that one was all true? Vickers doesn't say. It's the most puzzling book I've read in ages in terms of begging the question of what is going on in the mind of its author, so I wonder if you are able to shed any light on the matter.

I'm afraid, as per Mr Vickers' other works, it's crafted in an arid manner with reams of useless trivia crying out for an editor's blue pencil. (And for all that, there's still lots that remains unpublished about the Duke: eg that he used to go cruising for sailors in the company of the automobile heir Walter Chrysler Jnr., etc.). One also senses that the author may have come to loathe the late HM the Queen Mother, but is too polite to employ the term 'Howling Cunt'.

Yours,

A Most Puzzled Reader.

P.S. Recently visited NZ. Going As Far was deliciously accurate, and could have Gone Further!

Dear Puzzled Reader

I'm afraid Madame Arcati has read her last book in her present incarnation and, alas, it wasn't a book by Hugo Vickers. I am therefore unable to offer an explanation for his workmanlike foibles or attachment to royal trivia. However, it should not surprise one that the febrile world of royal biography is a carbonated stew of bitterness and revenge: worthy of its own history I'm sure. This, too, shall be a book I avoid.

Ever

Madame Arcati x

Prince Andrew and a confusion of dukes at the Spectator

Though I hardly ever read The Spectator these days, I am always happy to scan its weekly emails informing me of what I'm missing. This week, the mag's editor Fraser Nelson - who aspires deludedly to best Madame Arcati's prophetic skills, given his love of making predictions - is a-huffin' and a-puffin' about what he calls Andrewgate: the appalling demolition of Prince Andrew at the hands of anti-royalist knockers, 'unnamed advisers' and other plotters.

I may be missing something here but midway through his advert he writes: 'For my part, I look into the politics behind Andrewgate. Cameron, I understand, was shocked to see how quickly these unnamed advisers laid into the Duke of Edinburgh... '

Does he perhaps mean the Duke of York aka Prince Andrew? Juicily, Nelson adds, 'And Taki has some new gossip about the duke's American host, Jeffrey Epstein.' Since I have no intention of reading Mr Nelson's doubtless invaluable insights into the 'deeper, darker forces' behind the royal scandal, nor Taki's, I shall never know which duke he was thinking of. I fear it matters little.

William & Kate's wedding invitation wording: A little too with-it?

Click invite for engorged version

I meant to say sooner but one small detail of the Lord Chamberlain's invitation to the wedding of William and Kate interested me. The grammar. Guests are invited to the marriage of the prince with Kate. The traditional wording would normally employ the preposition to, although 'with' is not incorrect and is now customary in more fashionable circles: 'with' does enhance the suggestion of a meeting of equals.

However, it should be said that Debrett's, which I find quite common, is very much a to-ist  (click here) and appears to part company with the increasingly modish Royal Family, eschewing the with-ism in its formal wedding invitation template. Perhaps grammarians would care to comment.

Did Patric Walker murder Celeste for her column?

Patric Walker (the love of his life was his intimate friend actor Richard Chamberlain - whether Richard knows this precisely I couldn't say)

Further to my appreciation of Nicky Haslam's incomparable memoir Redeeming Features - the only thing that could make you want to have diarrhoea because it is the ultimate loo read (antiseptic Wet Ones at the ready, please) - I am distressed by two things on p108 on the subject of a very famous dead astrologer.

The late Patric Walker was the master stargazer of the late 20th century as well as actor Richard Chamberlain's most expressive admirer. Thanks to lucrative international syndication, and a socialising liver which sadly was not as robust as one might have wished, his constellation of sunsign frippery informed and entertained hundreds of millions of hopers. Yet, even though Patric was a Haslam intimate, a frequent companion in a basement club beneath Fortnum & Mason, in the company of pretty boys, Nicky misspells his name as Patrick. How Patric must be seething wherever. The omission of the k was special, part of the mythologising branding: had Patric been born Colin he would now be remembered as Coli,  a thought that brings back to mind antiseptic Wet Ones. Patric died of salmonella poisoning in 1995, by the way.

Nicky!  Please correct for the reprint!

Richard Chamberlain:

 a gratuitious inclusion in this piece

It doesn't end there. Nicky then goes onto suggest that Patric (a Libran) may have in 1974 murdered his octogenarian astrologer mentor Celeste  in order to grab her horoscopic column on Harpers & Queen (as was): he did this by pushing her down some stairs, it was rumoured. Celeste was the pseudonym of the American astrologer Helene Hoskins: she taught Patric everything she knew about the heavens. It could be that this "rumour" was part of the fun campery of the time: but who knows?

I certainly detected no homicidal tendencies in Patric when I interviewed him back in the 80s: indeed so taken was he by the sight of me he exited to the hotel bathroom and rejoined me in vain in his silky dressing gown. It was early afternoon. We talked of his chasing asses around his home in Lindos on the island of Rhodes. I think he said asses.

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.

Nicky Haslam: Cock-cocking with Tony and Roddy

Nicky Haslam's Redeeming Features autobio is out on Nov 5 and one of its delights is his revelation that the old party-goer and name-dropper cock-cocked with Tony Armstrong-Jones (now Lord Snowdon) in the 1950s, before Tony married Princess Margaret, and later with Roddy Llewellyn, before Roddy became her boyfriend. I had never thought of Nicky till now as the late Queen sister's unwitting bedtime taster.

Helen Mirren and the Queen: Did they?

The Evening Standard's The Londoner’s Diary gossip column reports confidently that HM has not seen The Queen – first shown on British TV last night. This contradicts my information – she viewed the movie some time ago and found it irritating in places but not entirely inaccurate – hence the warmth extended to her celluloid doppelgänger Helen Mirren through the media. The Queen will never endorse a movie beyond acknowledging Mirren's great success.

Asked by the Chicago Tribune on August 28 whether she thought the sovereign had watched Stephen Frears’ movie, Mirren said: “I don't know directly. I can't imagine that she didn't. I very, very much imagine that she did.” Anyone who knows the regal, onetime anti-monarchist Mirren would take that as a diplomatic “yes”. On set these days she’s more royal than Princess Michael of Kent.

Another surprise: I hadn’t realised Mirren and the Queen had had their lunch at Buckingham Palace, as reported in the Diary – this certainly went un(der)-reported. There’s no mention of it in the Nexis or Court Circular archives, but Arcati is fallible. I suppose it could have happened: perhaps someone will furnish some detail here. [They have not lunched - see above posting]

What did I think of the film? Comic in tone, content and spirit. No one in the establishment (except her sons) could give a flying fuck about Diana while millions of flower buyers bawled. It’s a very English, stiff-upper lip response to the real-life histrionics. The character most maligned in the film is Prince Charles - depicted as a snivelling, creepy egotist only concerned with his PR, post-Di. I liked the scene where HM scornfully switches off the TV the moment Camilla's name is mentioned. The film as a whole is not as affectionate as I had been led to believe by critics: it is a sweet satire that will sharpen as Diana's memory dissolves.