Petite noblesse

Sir: Since, contrary to all rules of correct journalistic conduct accepted outside the High Court, your contributor Taki has cited me by name as a source in his column

from New York (most inappropriately entitled 'Morality') of 27 April, I trust you

will allow me, even at the risk of exasperat- ing your readers, to have the last word on the topic in which he has sought to embroil me. To be quite candid, I cannot now recall if in 1978 I vouchsafed to him what was certainly no secret amongst such nobs and swells as were then, after thanking their lucky stars that their own fathers had not done likewise, in Munich and else- where making bad-taste gallows-humour jokes about Marie-Christine von Reibnitz's German sire, who, while innocent of any criminal act, had very early on in the Hitler era joined the SS. The fact that this, in the social circles in which she then moved, was common knowledge certainly rendered more difficult for some the suspension of disbelief required to accept at face value the extraordinary scenario recently initi- ated by Grub Street's Mr James Whittaker. No doubt much to the surprise and displea- sure of this mythomanic nosey parker, from all this Princess Michael, already possessed of undoubted star quality, has

emerged as top of the Royal pops with the fickle British public (Daily Mirror, Daily Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?).

Yet why should Taki have chosen to Pursue his own incomprehensible vendetta against the Princess by gratuitously insult- ing her? 'Her only sin,' he asserted with quite shameless and easily verifiable un-

truthfulness, 'is to have lied about her father's title. He is [sic] no more a baron than [Taki] is an Old Etonian.' If any of

Prince Michael's grander and stuffier for- eign relations may, as gossip at the time

had it, have complained that they hadn't been able to find his future father-in-law in their A lmanach de Gotha, that was perhaps only because their libraries at that time didn't run to a full set of the Genealogis- ches Handbuch des Adels , down to and including every man-jack squireen and hobereau of Europe's petite noblesse. A

short walk from his mid-town Manhattan residence to New York's marvellous public library (one of Germany's greatest gifts, via the Astor family, to Western civilisa- tion) would have enabled Taki to check the 1977 edition (no. 65) and to find, on page

297 of vol. 10, that part which is concerned with baronial families and with that branch

of the second line of the von Reibnitzes (some of whom can trace themselves back to the 13th and others to the 17th century)

from which Princess Michael is descended an her Freiherr father's side. Taki could thus have discovered that her family's

barony, unlike,those say of Lords Weiden- feld or Kagan and that lot, is very much present in those protocol-proud pages.

Certainly nothing in the life of the unfortunate Baron (exculpated in toto by Simon Wiesenthal and laundered to the palest possible shade of grey by the verdict of the Bavarian denazification tribunal already available to her in her native tongue) seems to have warranted the `deep shame' and so on about it so hastily volunteered by his daughter on a television channel in which her husband has, it seems, a linking interest. Her late father appears too to have been gratifyingly free of the sort of snide anti-semitism that all too often leaks from the pen of Taki, the unrepentant apologist of the Colonels' regime in his own country. I very much hope the wayward Greek boy will take time off from his admirable crusade against Teddy Kennedy's bid for the Presidency to make some amende honorable to the lady, who can't answer back because of court conventions, and to her father, who can't answer back because he is dead.

Alastair Forbes

Chateau d'Oex, Switzerland