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Now, my heart goes out to the Princess. She and I have been quite close, and I once took her to see the most erotic statue in London – it is, since I sense a raised eyebrow, of Sir Arthur
Sullivan, and it may be viewed opposite the Embankment entrance to the Savoy, for those of you who are, as it were, curious – and her response was so earthy a giggle that grown men within a
radius of perhaps 50 yards went off for a bit of a lie down. So it is not to compound her current embarrassment but to attempt to alleviate it that I remind you that, during the recent
misunderstanding between her two countries, her father was a mounted SS officer. It is therefore not beyond the bounds of imagination to wonder whether – in, say, 1940 – he and his
trusty horse might not have been parachuted into Britain with a saddlebagful of exploding Fruit & Nut.

We now know that none of the bars went off. So it is not impossible that, in some attic of Nether Lypiatt, there is a brass-bound diddy-box of inherited mementoes containing, among the monocles
and armbands and Lugers and cigarette-holders, a bar of chocolate, pristine in its cleverly forged Cadbury’s wrapper. Now, do those of us who still respect life’s social decencies not
relish the idea of the Princess ringing up Mr Mahmood and inviting him down to let bygones be bygones, and, upon his departure, giving him a little snack for his homeward journey? I see her
standing at a tall window, drawing aside a velvet swag the better to watch her tormentor stroll down the long drive, pause to snap off a nutty chunk, and blow his head all over Gloucestershire.

I
WAS
a lavatory, once. And a pretty convincing one, too, though I say it myself. Indeed, it was saying it myself that,
eventually, made me convincing: what I had to say myself was ‘Watch out, germs! Here comes Harpic!’, and I had to say it over and over again, hundreds of times, until, as the long
day’s sun sank below the wonky jalousie of my tiny Soho studio, I finally became the most convincing lavatory you ever heard. Truly bog standard.

I don’t know, mind, if you did ever hear it. You would have to have been watching afternoon ITV, when those who constitute the target market for domestic hygiene take a short breathless
break from mop and aerosol, plonk down before the box with mug and Hobnob, and are brainwashed into disinfectant seduction. You would not, of course, have seen me on that box: you would have seen
only a cartoon khazi, the chirpy mouth on its twinkling upturned lid synchronised to my six mesmeric words.

It was, sometime in the early ’80s, my big acting break. Sadly, the break itself broke a few ads later, after my voice-over roles as a dancing onion, a time-shared Spanish hovel, and a
recently shrunken haemorrhoid unaccountably failed to convince any new advertising agents or their clients that I was irresistible commercial timber. Or, rather, timbre. I did a few auditions, was
assured I would be let know, but never heard anything; except Richard Briers or Martin Jarvis or, on one particularly hurtful occasion, Sue Pollard, brilliantly playing what I had pitiably come to
think of as my patio door, my egg-whisk, my cat meat.

Which is why, instead of lolling on a burnished Bermudan poop guzzling pâté de foie gras and Dom Perignon from a couple of Asprey buckets while I wait for my helicopter to return
with Cameron Diaz, I am still up here in the Camden loft, punching a keyboard. However, if you now direct your glance to the top of this column, you may well share my view that things could very
soon take a swift turn for the better. That is because you read in last Wednesday’s
Times
that ‘drinks companies have been ordered to hire paunchy balding men for
advertisements to meet new rules forbidding any link between women’s drinking and sex.’

What has ordered the companies to do this is the Committee of Advertising Practice, which, exercised over female binge-boozing, is concerned that current ads showing Brad Pitt and Vinnie Jones
supping Heineken and Bacardi respectively – even as George Clooney’s pen squiggles a £2.5 million Martini contract – will persuade young women that, were they to front up at
the Rat & Cockle in good working order, they could reasonably expect much more than mere pints to be pulled.

I have to say, despite the risk to what have suddenly become my great expectations, that I find the CAP’s argument a mite tricky to support. While I know none of these male glamourpusses
personally, I cannot but think it highly unlikely that if, sitting quietly at the bar (an even sexier three inches taller as the happy result of the newly stuffed wallet beneath them) these hunks
were to be lurchingly approached by a shrieking woman with each mottled eye rolling differentially in her head, above a mouth errantly lipglossed onto her chin and a lava lamp riveted to her
tattooed navel, Brad or Vinnie or George would without a second thought fall into her flailing arms simply on the strength of their sharing a fancy for the same tipple.

Nevertheless, I shall go with the flow; and since what is flowing seems to have become unacceptable to the Committee of Advertising Practice, I happily lay before them the tempting stall of my
CV and my snapshot. And I do so not solely for the enormous personal gain that their desperate industry will be compelled to front up for the right wrinkly, I also offer myself in the role of
caring public altruist, eager to do the state some service. For if these hapless women can be convinced that the only result of sinking a couple of dozen Bacardi breezers and a kegful of pina
colada would be to end up with a bald old git whose long-gone best years were spent as a hysterical thunderbox and a talking pile, they might very well sign the pledge tomorrow.

Any day now, I could be seen as the curse of the drinking lasses.

O
FSTED
’
S
chief inspector of schools, says not only that the history curriculum places far too
much emphasis on the Tudors and World War Two, but also that students are unable to remember key dates or major events. If the end-of-term answer paper which just happened to blow into my hands on
a capricious Christmas Eve gust is anything to go by, he is not wrong.

1. It was Richard III who got the Tudors started, by losing the Battle of Britain. The poor sod never stood a chance against the House of Lancaster once it had invented the
four-engined bomber. Also, his Scandinavian allies let him down fatally by staying neutral so’s they could make ballbearings for both sides: his last words were: ‘A Norse! A Norse! My
kingdom for a Norse!’

2. The thing Henry VII was most worried about at the beginning of his reign was the Scots. To get James IV of Scotland on side, he sent his illegitimate daughter to marry him.
She was a fit-looking woman, though barmy, called Margaret Hess.

3. The person who created the Royal Navy was Henry VIII. One of his really top ideas was the submarine: he made loads of these which hunted in packs under the English Channel
and sank all sorts of foreign boats and took jewels and spices and silks off them, but their best result was against the German Armada. Henry’s victory was to put Adolf Hitler off the idea of
invading England for good. The last Tudor submarine to surface was the
Mary Rose
. My theory about why it didn’t come up for four hundred years is that nobody had remembered to tell
the captain the war was over.

4. The book
Tudor Cornwall
was written by A. L. Rowse. My teacher, Mr Foskett, who has just done a civil partnership with the Headmaster and is in a bit of a frisky
mood, told our class that after A. L. Rowse had finished with
Tudor Cornwall
he went on to do
Stuart Hampshire
. Mr Foskett couldn’t stop laughing at this, but none of us
could see the joke.

5. In the reign of Henry VIII, the second most important man in England was Cardinal Wolseley. He not only invented the police-car, he also designed the engine for the
Churchill tank. This was to play a major part in the Battle of the Bulge, so called because Henry VIII, who had originally planned to lead the English armoured brigade into battle, made the mistake
of having lunch first, and was unable to squeeze himself through the hatch.

6. They are the six wives of Henry VIII. After the fall of London, he took them all up on the roof of his Hampton Court bunker and shot them, to stop the Russians giving them a
seeing-to.

7. The Dam Busters raid was led by Wing-Commander Sir Francis Drake, who got the idea for a bouncing bomb during a game of bowls at Plymouth Argyle. The bombs were built by
Wallis Simpson, aided by Grommet, but one went off accidently before the raid and killed Drake’s dog. I know the dog’s name, and would like to get an extra mark for writing it down, but
I am not allowed. Can I get an extra mark for saying that Sir David Frost is remaking the film of the raid? I do not know much about the new script, except that when the Lancasters arrive over the
Ruhr, Drake chucks open his cockpit window and shouts at the Germans: ‘Hallo, good evening, and welcome!’

8. The reasons for her remaining the Virgin Queen were that the only two blokes to get anywhere near were Essex and Raleigh. She turned the first one down because it was better
to be called the Virgin Queen than the Essex Queen. She turned the second one down because, although he got rich after inventing the bicycle, he was stingy, and only ever gave her fags or chips,
neither of which she could get the hang of. Chips made her cough.

9. The reason the theatre flourished under Queen Elizabeth the First was because it always does when there is a war on. It keeps people’s spirits up. The top playwriter
was William Shakespeare, the Earl of Bacon, and his theatre was called the Windmill, which never closed.
Hamlet and Cleopatra
was far and away the most popular play put on there, even
though Cleopatra had to stand dead still after Hamlet tore all her clothes off. Its best song was ‘Whale Meat Again’, due to food rationing.

S
IMON
Cellan Jones, director of Channel 4’s
The Queen’s Sister
admitted to
The Times
that the
film ‘plays fast and loose with the facts in search of some kind of real truth.’ As you would expect, I asked for a transcript of the commentary. Clock these highlights.

On June 6, 1944, Princess Margaret was the first Girl Guide to wade ashore at Normandy. She did not, of course, wade herself; she cantered in on the shoulders of her
Brownie-in-Waiting, Joan Collins, under withering cross-talk from the US 4th Division, to her right, and the 2nd British Army, to her left, who were concerned that HRH’s Phantom V, bogged
down in the sand, was holding up the disembarkation of the Allied armour.

The Princess, however, with what was to become her legendary knack with ordinary people, told a Canadian platoon that if they didn’t tow her car onto the road they would all be hanged for
treason; so, despite heavy casualties, they did. Her chauffeur, Noel Coward, then drove her towards Caen – where he knew a wonderful little place for lunch – only to be cut off by a
squadron of Tigers. Normally more than a match for the statelier Rolls-Royce, the tanks were on this occasion commanded by Oberleutnant ‘Binkie’ von Ginsberg, who had not only played
polo for The Sandringham Tiddleypoms in 1934 but had also enjoyed a brief inter-chukka affair with Mrs Simpson after losing his way to the gents. A chivalrous Junker and coward, he instantly
surrendered, for which action the Princess was awarded a Distinguished Service Badge, sewn to her uniform by the little French girl who was to grow into a lively soubrette with interestingly close
links to the Royal Family.

In 1955, heartbreak struck when Margaret decided not to marry war hero Mickey Rooney, not because he had been divorced six times, but because she feared that none of their
children would be more than four feet tall. But romance returned to her life when, a few years later, she took up with Brian Armstrong-Jones, the fifth Beatle, only to end in tragedy when he was
thrown into a swimming-pool, possibly by the Archbishop of Canterbury, for constitutional reasons.

She then began a turbulent affair with her cousin Lawrence Llewellyn Bowes-Lyon, the playboy hill-farmer, to whom she gave huge sums of money in support of his makeover scheme to brew organic
gin, which could be poured on Weetabix to create a wholesome yet stimulating breakfast. Sadly, the relationship broke up during one of many experimental tastings, when the couple fell out over
whether breakfast should be served with a twist or an olive.

Famously fascinated from infancy by both fancy dress and show business, in 1959 Princess Margaret secretly joined
The Black and White Minstrel Show
. Watched –
though not spotted – by nearly 20 million viewers, she sang ‘Way Down Upon De Swanee Ribber’ so convincingly that it became the anthem of the Weybridge Klavern of the Ku Klux
Klan.

By now, her weekend house parties were the talk of both the beau monde and the gutter press – the latter, indeed, these being the days of hot-metal typesetting, once running out of
asterisks to describe what HRH didn’t give for either of them. Her lovable temper, however, was cleverly brought under control on one famous occasion by none other than Lew Hoad. Commanded to
join the Princess and her entourage at Bonkers, the Bermuda hideaway of celebrity society cook Mrs Cecil Beeton, the great Wimbledon champion was invited to play a singles match against his
hostess. Hoad, serving blindfold with a ping-pong bat, won the first set 6-0 in under two minutes, whereupon his opponent, having given her Tom Collins an enthusiastic suck, stubbed her cigarette
out in Hoad’s ear and summoned her protection officers.

After they had had a quiet word with Lew, the match resumed and the Australian lost 6-4. This became known as the Princess Margaret set.

U
P
betimes, dawn the colour of a herring’s belly, and out to the frosted car. To find a big glossy card beneath the
windscreen wiper. Nothing odd about that, you say, every day there is a new BOGOF pizza cobbler, a new once-in-a-lifetime deal on double-glazed grannie-patios, a new ex-SAS Home Office registered
24/7 security platoon, a new crack squad of state-of-the-art cutting-edge drain-rod engineers, a new purveyor of fresh fish daily to the doorsteps of the discerning gentry, a new girl in town, the
former Miss Gdansk, silicone-free, own soap, all major credit cards accepted, absolute discretion assured . . . but, this time, it was none of these.