I WAS CURIOUS to see whether Crawfie would think up
some ingenious excuse for her bloomer in Woman's Own the week before last, when she breezily described the cancelled Trooping the Colour and the postponed Ascot. But I should have known that her next column would betray no hint of embarrassment. One who can convert so sickeningly into cash her former long friendship with the Queen and Princess Margaret is not the person to be shamed in her own eyes by coming a mere journalistic cropper. The sausage machine grinds on. But it has a rival now in the shape of Cobina Wright, one of Prince Philip's 'closest friends,' who is grinding out in the same distinguished magazine 'the warm, human, different story of the real Prince Philip.' From what I have seen of it, it seems to be fairly harmless chit-chat, but that is not the point. 'Now I feel the time has come,' writes Cobina Wright, `to let others know those secrets. I feel that, not just because the young man is now one of the foremost men in all the world and it is neces sary for us to know what kind of man he really is, but because a good and happy story ought to be shared by all.' Prince Philip, so she says, once called her 'Madre—the lovely Italian word for "Mother."' That's one up on Crawfie! I cannot imagine that Prince Philip looks on these antics With much pleasure. If Cobina Wright was not in fact once a close friend of his, then her 'warm, human, different • story' is a disgraceful manufacture. And if she was, it is more disgraceful still. It is bad enough when former servants tell their petty tales, but when friends too begin to cash in, this trade becomes really revolting.
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