Galaxy

4 Dec 2013

The Princess of Wails! She's a crimper's daughter who lives in a palace then moans about the rent. But Princess Pushy has always lived in a fantasy world, says CHRISTOPHER WILSON

In the lap of luxury: Prince and Princess Michael of Kent live within the high walls of Kensington Palace



Cocooned as she is in luxury within the high walls of Kensington Palace, it’s hard to conjure up a more pampered existence.


Servants, curtseys, chauffeur-driven cars, salutes and red carpets; the certain fact she will never go hungry.

So why is Princess Michael banging on about the rent?


With all the advantages and none of the responsibilities of being royal, the 68-year-old princess has spent her married life in a truly enviable situation.


She does not a stroke of work in support of the Royal Family. Her time is her own: no boring ribbons to cut or hands to shake.

 Princess Pushy: The 68-year-old princess has spent her married life in a truly enviable situation


And she’s allowed to make money any way she likes. Truly, Princess Pushy has morphed into Princess Cushy.


And yet in an interview to celebrate her latest book, the question of the rent she pays comes up more than once.


She points out that she’s done ‘a little bit of decorating in Russia, consultancy. I’ve got five jobs now. Pay the rent!’


You get the feeling that it really hurts to part with the cash, even though she’s only been asked to pay something more than a nominal sum since 2010. (Before that it was a mere £69 a week in peppercorn rent.)

Agreed, the £120,000 a year she is required to part with seems a lot — though not when you count the number of rooms (ten main ones, plus ancillary offices), its prime location, gate security, heating and lighting and the other amenities she and her husband enjoy at Kensington Palace. 


Yet even the present sum is not beyond their means. When the Queen was forced to restructure her grace-and-favour residences a few years ago to bring rents into line with present-day market values, the Kents realised they were living too high off the hog and sold their Gloucestershire mansion, Nether Lypiatt, in 2006 for £5.75 million.


Properly invested, that money should have been enough to pay the bills at Kensington Palace and have a tidy sum left over, but in Marie Christine’s fantasy world, a Royal Highness should not be trifling with such matters as rent.


Let’s be clear, since her arrival on the royal scene in the mid-1970s, the Czech-born princess has added considerably to the gaiety of the nation.


Never one to miss the opportunity to put her foot in it, she nonetheless added a splash of glamour in the pre-Diana days. For the past 40 years, she has played the royal with gusto.


She’s quick-witted and well-read, and wears a tiara beautifully. But like the Duchess of York she’s never quite got being royal. Somehow, to Marie Christine, becoming a princess meant having it all, and then some. And rent? Pouf!


This disjointure from reality crops up often in Marie Christine’s interview, published in next month’s Tatler to coincide with release of her historical novel The Queen Of Four Kingdoms.


It’s interesting to see her adding the same fictional twists to her own life as she does to the characters in her book.


The Tatler article is titled Blonde Ambition, but, whisper it softly, her hair in its natural state is nearer brunette. She claims she knows ‘the real story’ about Princess Diana, but probably doesn’t. 

Timely union: Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, pictured on their wedding day, left, became a couple after the Princess's marriage to Tom Troubridge hit the buffers


She’s patronising about her neighbours at Kensington Palace, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, saying they’ll soon be giving up  their apartment there (it’s news to the Gloucesters). 


And she claims her union with Prince Michael - son of the old Duke of Kent and grandson of King George V - was an ‘arranged marriage’.


That must mean, surely, that the House of Windsor went in search of a wife for one of their princelings and decided the most suitable match was a Roman Catholic divorcee, stepdaughter of a town hall clerk, who’d grown up in a working-class Sydney suburb and whose mother ran a hairdressing salon?


That’s a very mangled version of what occurred. What actually happened was that when her brief first marriage to Old Etonian banker Tom Troubridge hit the buffers in the early Seventies, Prince Michael came a-calling.


Some say (in fact, quite a lot say) that she went after him like a greyhound after a rabbit. But Marie Christine dwells not on such tittle-tattle. Instead, she talks of the lengths that the late Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles’s godfather, went to to fix her up with Prince Michael. (‘I realised afterwards that Mountbatten thought I’d be good for my husband.’)

Sale: The Kents sold their Gloucestershire mansion, Nether Lypiatt, pictured, in 2006 for £5.75 million

Again, no mention of the difficulty the old matchmaker had in persuading not only courtiers but the Queen, too, that MC — as she’s often called after her initials — was a good idea.


In the mid-Seventies, a royal prince such as Michael marrying a Roman Catholic was out of the question, and the idea of a divorcee in the royal family about as popular as if he’d said he wanted to marry the widowed Duchess of Windsor.


Courtiers were said to have been appalled at the prospect of Marie Christine, and the only ‘arranging’ Mountbatten did was to convince them all that if Prince Michael gave up his claim to the throne, it would just about be allowable.


The marriage ceremony in Vienna said it all: neutral territory, so that it would have been at least a little less embarrassing if the wheels fell off the relationship.


But they never did. Though the union was sorely tested emotionally and financially at different times, the couple have survived the worst and face old age together with an admirable dollop of optimism.


Nonetheless, Marie Christine remains the Edwina Currie of the Royal Family — dazzled by her own brilliance, surprised the world doesn’t share her awe.

Royalty: Prince and Princess Michael of Kent join the Prince of Wales on the balcony of Buckingham Palace


She can’t quite resist the limelight, and her latest literary effort gives her the opportunity to tell us some more about herself.


She boasts to Tatler: ‘I have a great lineage. The Duke of Burgundy started the Order of the Fleece in 1430. And, of the first 20 members, 17 are my ancestors. 


‘Even Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poitiers [the first a French queen and mother of three kings, the second the mistress of Henry II of France] — I descend from them both. Do you descend from Charlemagne directly? Do you descend from Saint King Louis XI? I do!’


Sad, but understandable, that she should choose to focus on the illustrious past rather than her more recent history. For in her childhood, she lived in the working-class suburb of Waverley in Sydney. 


Her Silesian father, Baron Gunther von Reibnitz, with his wartime connections to the Nazis, had made a new life for himself in Mozambique. Her Hungarian mother, Countess Szapar, married a former Polish diplomat, Tadeus Rogala-Koczorowski, who got himself a job as a clerk at Sydney Town Hall.


To xenophobic Australians, this European influx in the aftermath of World War II was known contemptuously as ‘reffos’ (short for refugees) and Marie Christine, hugging her glorious ancestors to herself, went through her schooldays ashamed of where she lived.


She tried calling herself ‘Countess’ after her mother’s rank and ‘Baroness’ after her father’s, but the Aussies were having nothing of it: they simply called her ‘Schnitzel’.


Indeed, when she and her new princely husband paid a visit to Sydney in 1982, she made no triumphant return to Waverley. Nor did she meet her mother.


A rift had developed after she left Australia which never healed. Was it personal? Or was Pushy ashamed of having a hairdresser in the family?


So now, could it be that she summons those legends from the past, boasting so forcefully of those links to Charlemagne and King Louis, in an effort to banish those memories of her troubled youth?


‘The fact the war had cheated her of the life she felt was rightly hers [as a landed aristocrat] was never far from her mind,’ wrote her biographer Barry Everingham. ‘Much of the time she lived in a fantasy world.’


Complaining about the rent when you live in the lap of luxury …now that’s really living in a fantasy world.

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