All this hard work has been knackering me out, so I decided to spend the morning in bed. I was suckered into watching the whole of "This Morning" (the real one, not our hilarious spoof version from 1998/9) by the constant trails for a guest who claimed to be the illegitimate love-child of Princess Margaret. "How would he try and argue his way round that one?" I wondered, you know given that Madge was in the public eye for her entire life and you'd think someone might have noticed. Yet it was such an audacious claim that I had to wonder if there was some veracity in it. And surely the "This Morning" team would not have him on unless they had some pretty good evidence. Otherwise they would just be parading the mentally ill on TV for their viewers amusement. They wouldn't do that. Not Fern and Phil (and Sarah Green this week. Nice to see her back). It wasn't like their other guests were a woman who claimed to have been repeatedly abducted by aliens and another woman who photographed your aura and then told you what colour you should paint your walls (what if you lived with someone whose aura suggested a different colour to yours? Would you have to live in separate rooms?).
Of course the Princess Margaret "son" didn't come on until right near the end. They knew we wouldn't be able to resist. They deliberately stopped me getting out of bed and getting on with some work. I tell you, this story better be good and not just a stupid made up load of rubbish or I would be furious.
Princess Margaret will be glad that she is dead, because her secret son turned out to be a somewhat nervous and rambling type, with the darting eyes that are usually associated with paranoid delusionists.
I couldn't wait to find out why he thought he was the son of a member of the royal family: my guess was that he had either a special birth-mark in the shape of a lion and a unicorn or some royal seal/pendant that he has had since birth. But it turned out that he thought he was Princess Margaret's son because he had a feeling that he might be.
That's practically it.
He had a memory of being with a woman as a child of 18 months (right) and singing "I'm the King of the Castle and you're the dirty rascal" and the woman saying, "You might be king one day." Or something like that.
Now even if that woman had been Princess Margaret and she was his real mum, then I don't think she would be stupid enough to imagine that a) any of her kids would become king, but b) that her secret illegitimate child would be accepted as monarch. The secret bit at the very least would surely preclude it.
Essentially he had never got on with the mother he was brought up by and began to wonder if someone else was his mum. And he seems to have decided that that was the Princess, for not any real good reason, and then noticed that she was wearing a big coat in newsreel footage from around that time and had gone off to the Caribbean for a bit.
Not massively convincing or worth a morning off work.
He also said he thought he might have met Princess Margaret in adult life, he said in 2002, but then seemed to think it might have been 20 years ago. He had been at some function and someone had asked him to go into a room where a small woman who looked like a younger version of the queen talked to him for twenty minutes.
You'd think that if you thought your mum was Princess Margaret that you might recognise Princess Margaret when you met her. But possibly Princess Margaret had some kind of mind ray that could cause confusion to secret offspring.
He did understand why people might be sceptical and said he'd loved to be proved wrong, but didn't seem to understand that most of the scepticism resulted from the fact that he believed this mainly because he had a feeling about it. As a child I had a feeling that I was probably the new Jesus. And as it turns out I am. So I think you should go with these feelings. They are usually right.
Even despite all this strong evidence Buckingham Palace typically won't dig up Princess Margaret and have her DNA tested to prove this man's claims are wrong. Which makes me think there's probably something in it. Anyway, next time I see the queen I am going to pull out some of her hair so this can be sorted out once and for all.
