FROM THE UNDERGROUND
Princess Anne and the facts of life
TONY PALMER
Has Princess Anne had sex? It's not a question which you will have found much asked over the past few days, in spite of the plethora of public sycophancy resulting from the Princess's twenty-first birthday. Nor is it a question which necessarily one ought to ask about anyone in public except that, in this case, one has been swamped with such a tidal wave of other useless information about the young lady which seems to me far less stimulating. Yes, she didn't like The Music Lovers, and yes, she thought tying a fire-cracker to the ignition of Mummy's Land-Rover "a great hoot." Yes, she swears, although about what has not been officially disclosed. She has a threeroom suite in Buckingham Palace and once returned there at 5 a.m. — without her detective! But was she alone? You see, again, we are not told. She likes going out for the evening and dislikes being driven. "Her escorts are usually tall young men With nice speaking voices." (Hasn't she or her spokesman heard of boy-friends?) She got two A levels aild passed her driving test first time. All of which is pretty fascinating stuff, you have to admit. But all of it pales before that other vital and significant question — has she had sex?
At this stage, I must confess a bias. I have been passionate about her for well over a year. After all, she's rich, well-connected, and provided she keeps her mouth shut, not unattractive. I'm told she's pretty, although since I've never met her and since I firmly believe that the camera always lies, I would prefer to withhold judgement on that. She seems to dress elegantly, but then she can afford to, and she does make the best of her hair. But to return to her mouth, it's that which gets me. Not that I have any particularly lustful designs on it; it's just that I keep wondering does she know what to do with it? For in truth it is one of the most beautiful mouths I have ever observed — the mouth of a seductress, the knowing curve of the lips, the suspicion of a pout — I wonder what her escorts make of that? Because. you see, that's my point. It's all very well being a fairy-tale princess living in a castle and being surrounded by escorts and spokesmen who all have jolly nice voices and know about horses, but in the days of the glorious revolution what good will any of that do you? I know she goes well with a horse and does good works in East Africa (or was that Valerie Singleton?); but does she, for example, know that there are nearly a million unemployed? Does she know there are still slums? Does she know
how ridiculously anachronistic her royalty is today? Does she, in fact, know about sex? No doubt she reads the newspapers. But does she, for example, read that nasty little comic Oz? There's no reason why she should, but does she understand what that maligned minority are on about? Well, there is some evidence to suggest that she does. She did go to Hair — twice — although she is reported to have said that it "was nothing to get worked up about." But did an escort shield her eyes from that nude scene, I wonder? If not, then it's possible that she does listen to pop music, that she does know about the underground, that she has heard of the hippies and that she has hau sex — or, at least, knows what it's all about. I find it difficult to imagine that you can grow up as a young person today and no know about those things, although given a sufficient number of escorts and official spokesmen anything is possible, even probable.
Anyway, I think she's smashing and it's because I think she's smashing that I worry about all those escorts. You are what you eat, as they say, and although I'm not advocating that the Princess does a six-month course in slumming it just as her brother has been camping it up in the RAF for the last six months at the taxpayer's expense, I would like to be reassured that sexy Anne Elizabeth Alice . Louise is not going to have every last drop of humanity squeezed out of her by all those boring escorts. You may remember her brief appearance in the BBC's official Richard Cawston documentary (for which he did not receive the expected knighthood) called Royal in our Time. It was just about the only moment in the entire nineteen-hour film when one was allowed to think that the Royal Family was alive after all. Since then, we've had a great deal of her on a horse (or was that Valerie Singleton?) and I've no doubt that she's jolly good — because we've all been told so. If only she sailed a yacht we might have a unique opportunity for a constitutional reconciliation between Prime Minister and Crown the like of which has not won the Olympic Games since Good King Charles's golden days. Or something like that. Anyway, she's a bit too large for yachting or a bit too intelligent.
Usually she is described as being either "averagely quick on the uptake" or "by no means dim." I'd say that compared with the average royal she was bloody sharp. And given that intelligence is a curious mixture of heredity and environment, she's
survived remarkably well. Which brings me back to the escorts. If she has survived thus far, what chance are they going to give her? Now again, I don't know any of these escorts and have only their newspaper pictures to go on. But from this slender evidence I'd deduce that they're a pretty chinless lot. And even if she has heard of unemployment, I'd doubt whether they have. After all, there's something seriously wrong with the unbringing of any young person these days, whether royal or not, whose education consists of being made to suffer the imprisonment of a girls' private school followed by the round of private dances and private supper parties and private visits to the theatre and private escorts, as if that way of life and that alone is relevant to anything happening to Britain in 1971. It is not.
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