Social Note

A fortnight ago, peppery Laborite M.P. Tom Driberg let fall some pretty gossip in his Reynolds News column concerning a possible marriage between Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, who fought in the British Navy during the war, and who will take British citizenship in February. The Prince, said Driberg, is "intelligent and broadminded, fair and good-looking."

Last week, after gibes by fellow Laborites that he was a "monarchist" who had sold out and "joined in building up the royal wedding ballyhoo," Driberg felt constrained to defend his besmirched leftist reputation by leaning over backward so far he reached almost from Buckingham Palace to Billingsgate. Said Driberg:

"I do not know if this young man is going to marry Princess Elizabeth nor do I care a damn. I might reply to the sentimental view that she ought to marry an Englishman and a 'commoner' by arguing that her background being what it is, the kind of commoner she would be most likely to marry is one of the Tory guard officers with whom she goes dancing, or possibly the son of some prominent Munichite or former Fascist. It might be different if the poor girl had not been so carefully sheltered from contact with ordinary working-class and middle-class people."

If the marriage takes place and if Elizabeth becomes Queen, Philip of Schleswig -Holstein -Sonderburg -Gliicksburg, cousin of Greece's King George II, would be Britain's first Prince Consort since his great-great-grandmother Victoria's Albert.

At week's end, the New York Times archly whispered: "Only politics . . . is delaying the announcement of the engagement. . . . Because of the troubled situation in Greece it was thought the present was an inauspicious time . . . lest it provide a new reason for criticism of the Government's policy of keeping British troops in Greece."

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