The Problem Princess

The royal family's third-string Kensington Palace has seldom made news since the Duchess of Kent had a daughter there in 1819--and even then no one suspected that the gel would one day be Queen of England and Empress of India. Last week Queen Victoria's birthplace was less happily back in the headlines. In the House of Commons, a Labor M.P. suggested tartly that "at this time, when there are thousands of homeless in London," the government showed "deplorable priority sense" in spending $238,000 in public funds to repair the palace for its new occupants: Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon, onetime Society Photographer Tony Armstrong-Jones.

The palatial repair bill was only the costliest irritation in one of Britain's rare quarrels between the monarchy and the masses. Flying off on a three weeks' vacation in Antigua, the princess and her husband traveled by commercial airliner--but had the entire first-class section barred to other passengers. Commented Lord Beaverbrook's Sunday Express: "Another little touch of apartheid to ensure that the democratic idea is not carried too far." Britons were also irked by reports that a new hotel abuilding near Kensington Palace has been forced to reduce its height by several floors so the royal couple will not be observed by penthouse peepers.

Britons' biggest complaint against Princess Margaret is that she has all the expensive tastes of oldtime royalty, but shows little appetite for the official duties by which a modern English princess earns her $42,000-a-year salary. Even before her return to London, British mums noted grimly that Margaret's maternity leave from public life had lasted exactly 35 weeks. Voicing Britons' qualms with a bluntness rarely addressed to royalty, the Daily Mirror declared last week: "Her petulant decisions and her personal insistences are bound to raise the question sooner or later of whether she should retire into private life."

The princess's bad press was not sweetened by her husband's new job as artistic adviser on the Sunday Times (TIME, Jan. 26), where he was humbly greeted at the door on his first day last week by Owner Roy Thomson and Editor C. D. Hamilton. Newspaper cartoonists had a field day at the expense of their new colleague. One caricature showed the cover of Tony's magazine filled with saccharine shots of Margaret At Home; another pictured a housewife asking her news agent: "Which paper has the Tony?"

Queen Elizabeth is reportedly resigned to the prospect of Margaret's retirement from public life if she and Tony continue to rankle Britons. Alarmed by the criticism, Margaret's press officer announced that she had already accepted 16 public engagements (counting charity balls) for the next five months, added: "There may be more." Snorted the Laborite Daily Herald: "How busy can you get?"

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