Afternoon:
14°c
Go on, admit it. Even if like me you have little interest in the shenanigans of the royal family, you cannot fail to have had your curiosity piqued by the revelations about the Earl of Snowdon's love life. Anne de Courcy's new biography reveals he fathered an illegitimate child, Polly Fry, just months before marrying Princess Margaret; he later had another child outside wedlock with Melanie Cable-Alexander when he was married to his second wife. That's not to mention his oddball assortment of mistresses including Anne Hills, model Jacqui Chan and Lady Jacqueline Rufus-Isaacs. Where did he find the time? In fact, the problem was he had too much time on his hands - especially as Princess Margaret didn't get out of bed until midday.
Adultery is a subject of enduring fascination in modern biographies. Not for nothing does Michael Holroyd call them "the shallow end of history"; the prigs among us might question why we need to know about Lord Snowdon's misbehaviour in such tawdry detail. But it's not simply a matter of prurience. Biographers owe it to their readers - and to history - to tell the truth. And the new Snowdon book offers a fascinating insight into not just his life but the social mores of the day.
The fact that Lord Snowdon has co-operated with his biographer in dishing the dirt on himself is particularly startling. Such revelations would normally come out only after the subject has died. It certainly raises the threshold for future royal - and semi-royal - life stories. We will soon want the infidelity, the whole infidelity and nothing but the infidelity.
The trend for full disclosure has been gathering pace. VS Naipaul was the subject of an authorised noholdsbarred biography which divulged that he liked using prostitutes, beating up his mistress and verbally abusing his wife. Valerie Grove's authorised biography of John Mortimer revealed the Rumpole creator to have had a passionate friendship with a young boy while up at Oxford and chronicled his various extramarital affairs
I can see why Snowdon was such a hit with the ladies. In the few dealings I've had with him he has always been kind, courteous and charming. Amidst all these tales of bed-hopping, we should not forget his tireless efforts on behalf of the disadvantaged. But bed-hopping is what makes men - and biographies - tick. Such books may be the shallow end of history, but they certainly make a more diverting read. As Malcolm Muggeridge once said: "I confess I am far more interested in who sleeps with whom than in who voted for whom."
