Royal Doping Scandal

I recently recovered this - the very first story I ever wrote for the online incarnation of The Sleaze (it was the lead story in Issue 1 back in April 2000) - from my ancient and highly irascible old PC. I've decided to run it here, unedited, over the next few days, before, maybe, archiving it over at The Sleaze. So, without further ado, here's part one of Royal Doping Scandal:

Veteran Royal-watcher Hugh Ropley-Tossington is set to create controversy with his latest expose of the Royal Family - Muck House: Inside the Fun Palace. In it, he makes the sensational claim that in recent years several members of the Royal Family have regularly been doped at high-profile public functions in order to curb their potentially embarrassing madcap antics. The decision to use pharmaceutical constraints was allegedly taken in secret by senior government figures in the early 1980s, following a series of incidents involving, amongst others, Princess Margaret, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen Mother, which stretched back to the 1950s.

Ropley-Tossington chronicles Princess Margaret’s notorious late-night poker sessions held at Kensington Palace during the early 1950s. These alcohol-fuelled card-fests regularly involved both top celebrities and leading political figures of the day and culminated in the infamous strip-poker session which left Sir Winston Churchill in a state of extreme undress. A drunken Princess Margaret wagered the septuagenarian premier that he wouldn’t have the nerve to walk back to Downing Street naked. Sir Winston made it as far as Parliament Square before he was arrested by the police for waving his large cigar at a passing woman. He was bailed from Charing Cross Police station by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and the charges against him were eventually dropped when the woman involved admitted her mistake, saying “I should have known something that big in the hands of an old man was only a cigar - especially in that cold weather.”

Whilst Sir Winston escaped jail, he was forced to resign and new Prime Minister Anthony Eden quickly put paid to the card games. Bereft of her poker, Princess Margaret turned increasingly to drink, with her behaviour becoming ever more bizarre. In 1973, for instance, Ropley-Tossington claims that the Princess refused to lead an inspection of the Royal Wessex Fusiliers Regiment (of which she was Colonel-in-Chief) unless all the men were naked from the waist down. “I was promised that there would be privates on parade”, she remarked at the time.