Sir: Though I am very loath to prolong what is
now being widely dubbed the `Silly-Billy Season', I really must express my astonishment on reading in your Holy Week issue a letter from Lord Dudley stating, inter alia, quite falsely as a 'fact' that I had ever 'admitted' that any words used by me in 1984 in a few lines of a 1,700-word review of Lady Anne Somer- set's excellent book Ladies-in-Waiting 'did carry the meaning my wife imputed to them', as a generous jury was recently persuaded to decide. Had I, in the in- tervening years, ever been served with a writ I should have immediately stated my intention of most earnestly defending the action in person.
It is true that, after refusing to provide the grovelling apology and withdrawal demanded by Lady Dudley's solicitors, I sent to the latter a copy of the 'Apology and Clarification' I had felt it appropriate to offer to the Literary Review, receiving neither acknowledgment nor reply from either addressee. In this document I cor- rected and apologised for a minor error, attributing one cause of the admitted 1982 dispute between Princess Michael and Lady Dudley (`Shades of Queen Anne and Sarah Jennings' was how I put it) to a tiff over tipping in a British Embassy.
My clarification reminded readers of the Literary Review that Lady Dudley was only one of 'the 60 or so persons, titled and untitled, to have received appropriate con- textual mention' in my notice of Ladies-in- Waiting. 'Likewise her husband,' I went on,
who, it has nowhere been disputed, was the author and publisher of a scurrilous libel and slander grossly defamatory of HRH Princess Michael of Kent whom Lady Dudley at one time accompanied as companion and unoffi- cial Lady-in-Waiting on a most successful fund-raising trip to the USA undertaken by the Princess, both roles being performed to the latter's satisfaction.
There followed the correction referred to above from which Lord Dudley in the Spectator quoted with such conspicuously disingenuous selectivity. What I wrote was: I have since been informed that this [i.e. the tiff over tips] was not the correct casus of the Dudleys' bitterly belligerent ballad. . . . I unreservedly accept Lady Dudley's assur- ance that 'filthy lucre' played no part in the genesis of her husband's filthy poem, which the mass-circulation Daily Mail has de- scribed without contradiction as 'biting, bitchy and along the lines of Eskimo Nell', the latter notorious as one of the most obscene songs in the English repertory.
I apologise to Lady Dudley for my in- advertently inaccurate imputation. I at no time sought to defame the reputation of Lady Dudley which evidently continues to speak for itself. Res ipsa loquitur, as the lawyers' Latin jargon likes to put it.
I went on to suggest that nevertheless the Princess had been ill-advised to choose as companion 'anyone capable of suddenly becoming so avid of encouraging the public pillorying and ridicule of a member of the royal family, whose much-loved paren4- in-law, I cannot help recalling, began their honeymoon as guests of Lord Dudley's father at Himley Hall.' It was in that hospitable Midlands house,' I continued, 'that I acquired my largely quite agreeable memories of the present Earl's family.'
A propos apologies, I was not at all surprised to read in the Mail on Sunday of 7 July 1985 part of the text of the letter Lord Dudley himself addressed to Princess Michael on 17 December 1983:
I write on behalf of my wife and myself to place on record our most sincere regret for the grave distress and embarrassment which we have caused you, Prince Michael and your family and we unreservedly express our deep apologies. We acknowledge that the statements are untruthful and should never have been made. We undertake that we will never repeat or publish this offensive mater- ial again or anything similar relating to you or your family. •
This letter was handed to the royal solicitor by the ubiquitous Lord Goodman, no less. In the circumstances I am at a loss to understand why Lord Dudley should write to you to deny that his wife's lips like his own had been zipped up as I had written. What a pity the jury heard nothing of all this!
Alastair Forbes
Beefsteak Club, Pall Mall, London SW I
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