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.
