I once spent a Sunday with Princess Margaret. It was not an unqualified success. I was supposed to be showing her round some houses and gardens, in which she took a lively interest, but because of my incompetent map-reading we found ourselves in the hall of an unplanned pile. The wretched chatelaine, roused from an afternoon nap to discover that the Queen’s sister was on the premises, dropped a very creditable curtsey in her nightdress on the stairs, but the Princess was not amused.

Nonetheless, I was quite bowled over by Her Royal Highness. Far from the grotesquely caricatured demon drunken dwarf of popular mythology, the Princess was fun to be with and, in the flesh, extraordinarily alluring, with beautiful eyes and lovely skin. Even in her mid-fifties she still had an overpowering sex