He will rule out any big increase in SAS units.Yesterday accusations flew following the revelation that a guard had failed to spot arms being smuggled aboard a passenger flight at Manchester airport. A bag containing bomb-making equipment, guns, imitation explosives, detonators and a rifle magazine holding five dummy bullets was smuggled on to a British Airways flight to Gatwick by a security company, with the approval of BA, in order to test security checks at the airport.The arms were hidden in a book, a camera and a cigarette box. A security guard employed by Securicor ADI – the company responsible for scanning luggage passing through the airport – has been suspended and an investigation has been launched.. In a darkened room, curtains drawn, the sister of the Queen lies strapped into bed.

Her sight is permanently impaired; one arm is paralysed, in a sling. Her face is puffed from drugs administered to deal with the consequences of at least three major strokes. For her depression, from which she has suffered for at least a decade, there is no treatment. Dressed by the finest Parisian fashion houses, courted by England’s most eligible bachelors – in one year alone she is said to have received 31 proposals – she was Britain’s alternative queen, surrounded by her personal court; a woman who once declared, “I cannot imagine anything more wonderful than being who I am.”Princess Margaret is remembered for three dramas, three lives, each specific to its time: her affair with Peter Townsend, her marriage to Antony Armstrong-Jones, and the 1970s hedonism of Mustique, with her own toyboy, Roddy Llewellyn, to complete the outrageous picture.Her final days played out a different kind of drama. The cruel and the pitiless might suggest there was a justice about them, that Princess Margaret reaped an awful end because of her hedonistic past The drama of her going was essentially tragic.

But need it have been quite so dreadful if she had been treated differently?Her last illness began in February 1998 when she suffered her first stroke, in Mustique, where she lived at Les Jolies Eaux. “This is my house,” the Princess would say of it, almost defensively, “the only square inch in the world I own.”Shortly after the stroke, she was persuaded to make over Les Jolies Eaux to her son, Viscount Linley, who subsequently sold it for £1.6m. Anne Glenconner, one of her oldest friends, considers the sale of Mustique may have precipitated her subsequent and deep-seated depression.In March 1999 came the freak accident in which she burnt her feet in the bath. Lady Glenconner explains that “the doctors think she suffered a small stroke – that’s why she didn’t move”, contradicting rumours that the Princess had been drunk. A more serious stroke, at Christmas 2000, left her refusing to eat, a source of concern to her family.

Another major attack in March last year caused more concern.The Princess’s life had been punctuated by ill-health, and years of smoking and drinking inevitably caught up with her. By the mid-1970s, as her marriage to Lord Snowdon broke down, she was drinking to excess and slurred in public. The marriage had deteriorated to exchanged grunts in the Palace corridors. He would leave notes on the Princess’s table, including one headed “20 Reasons Why I Hate You”. Lady Glenconner admits drink became a problem for the Princess in those years. One actress recalls her holding court backstage: “She just drank whisky after whisky and wouldn’t go – so of course no one else could. It was the old Princess Margaret at her worst.”After her strokes, friends urged that she should try new forms of treatment, yet nothing changed.