LONDON -- So, here's Britain's beloved Queen Mum, cast as an amiable right-winger, telling of royal toasts to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and bemoaning the bad press given to P. W. Botha, the last unrepentant villain of South African apartheid.

And there's Queen Elizabeth II, presiding imperiously at the racetrack, "horse racing being the only thing she is interested in and knows something about."

Finally, there is the Iron Lady herself, Thatcher, described as "all woman," the vivacious champion of Britain's political scene in the mid-1980s.

These are the stars in Woodrow Wyatt's galaxy, a who's-who of aristocrats and media magnates, the so-called great and good who have dominated Britain since the beginning of time.

And not one of them seems to have known the former Parliament member and former newspaper columnist was keeping a diary as he moved about as an insider among Britain's powerful elite.

"I cannot let Mrs. T [Thatcher] down: She thinks I don't keep a diary because I told her that 10 years ago when it was true."

From the grave, Wyatt has given the elite an awful fright. He has spilled the royal and political beans in his secret diary, which was serialized over the last four weeks in the Sunday Times of London and which will hit British bookstores today as "The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt."

Wyatt was first elected to Parliament in 1945. He was a left-wing Labor socialist then, but had become a Thatcherite by the 1980s. He was a star television reporter, a newspaper columnist and, for the last 21 years of his life, chaired Britain's state-owned bookmaking service. In 1987 Wyatt was given a seat in the House of Lords. In his last years, he kept the secret diary so it could be published to serve as a financial cushion for his heirs.

His up-close views of the royal family and the Thatcher era have set pulses racing along the champagne-and-canapes circuit. But why should anyone care about old gossip from the mid-1980s?

Well, for one thing, the royals are supposed to be above politics, keeping whatever political views they have to themselves. For another, Wyatt broke the first rule of Britain's insiders: In a world where nobody is to say anything to outsiders, he has told a lot, becoming a tattle-tale and providing a good read spiced with sexual innuendo, wit and provocative characters.

The line from Buckingham Palace is that the diaries were warmed-over dinner-party conversation that did not much bother the royal family. The London Daily Telegraph called it "The Guinness Book of Name Dropping." The Guardian, tongue in cheek, said it is "the most subversive text since 'The Communist Manifesto.' "

Some questioned Wyatt's version of events. His claim that former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was expelled from Eton, England's premier private school, for homosexual conduct was excoriated by Conservative Party historian Lord Blake. "It's an outright lie. I wouldn't trust Wyatt an inch," Lord Blake fumed to London's Evening Standard.

Eton College archivist Penny Halfield said: "This story of Macmillan being expelled crops up vaguely from time to time," and added: "There is nothing in the archives to say that. Records of expulsion have not by and large survived. There is nothing to indicate he was expelled."

Writer Antonia Fraser knocked Wyatt's boast that they had kissed at a racetrack 25 years ago. "I do not think he would have been able to reach up," she told the Evening Standard. Wyatt "had a fantasy thing about tall blondes, and evidently, that's me."

Wrote the Evening Standard's David Sexton: "Wyatt, always an operator, aimed these diaries carefully at the market for mucky tattling. He plainly understood that, though readers have become skeptical of most forms of writing, they still believe in diaries, quite naively."

Mainly, the diaries provide a reminder of just how good the British are at this sort of storytelling. From Samuel Pepys' slice of the 17th century to Alan Clark's testosterone-filled account of Thatcherism in the 1980s, the British have demonstrated an uncanny ability to write piercing accounts of social and political life.

An inside track

"Wyatt straddled separate worlds and gives us all an insight into those worlds," says John Witherow, the Sunday Times editor. "He crossed several areas. He mixed in high political levels. He befriended Thatcher and flattered her outrageously. He mixed with the royal family. The Queen Mother must have quite liked him."

It's hard to imagine an American counterpart to Wyatt. He was a one-of-a-kind figure, born July 4, 1918, and named after U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. He was married four times, confidant of the rich and famous, rarely seen without his trademark cigar and bow tie. When he died at 79 last year, the Times of London obituary provided an apt description: "Woodrow Wyatt was a card."

"He was in many ways a nostalgic figure -- someone who would have felt as much at home during the Regency era as he did in Margaret Thatcher's Britain," the Times wrote. "His political advice was always much sought. Yet to claim that he was simply a courtier is slightly to miss the point. He was determined to be a 'character' -- and that meant being his own man."

What Wyatt hoarded most in his journals were the nuggets extracted on the dining and racing circuits, where champagne and gossip flowed amid luxurious surroundings.

It's a world in which the royals enjoy "lashings of strawberries and cream and scones and funny little pastries." It's where a merchant banker feasts on caviar while the market crashes. And it's where social death is registered by table seating arrangements.

Only an insider like Wyatt could have written: "Once I would have thought it exciting to have tea in the Royal Box [at Ascot race course]. Now I find it something of a boring nuisance."

His take on the queen's sister, Princess Margaret, is that she never reconciled herself "to being No. 2." He described the queen's daughter, Princess Anne, as reverting "to her usual rude self."

On Prince Michael of Kent, the queen's cousin: "I'm beginning to think he is more of an a-- than I thought he was."

On Nicholas Soames, grandson of Winston Churchill: "He is loutish and given to apish jokes ... he is a close friend of the prince of Wales, which doesn't say too much for the prince of Wales."

On Diana, princess of Wales: "I'm not surprised that Prince Charles is bored with this backward girl who couldn't even pass any O-levels" -- Ordinary Levels are basically a test given to English 16-year-olds to determine whether further education would be worthwhile.

His most controversial extract portrayed a political split between the Queen Mother, a woman as old as the century, and her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II.

Right-wing royal

Wyatt portrays the Queen Mother as the most right-wing royal. Small surprise for a woman who at 98 was born when Queen Victoria was still on the throne and the British Empire included a quarter of the globe and 400 million of its inhabitants. She was a firm supporter of Thatcher who claimed the royal family used to toast Thatcher after dinner. Wyatt wrote that the Queen Mother "adores Mrs. Thatcher and thinks she is very brave and has done tremendous things."

By contrast, Wyatt recorded that Queen Elizabeth "wouldn't mind a bit if there was a Labor government," and that she was a tad hostile to Thatcher, even relating secondhand how she went out of her way to embarrass the political leader in 1986 at the royal retreat in Balmoral, Scotland.

Wyatt wrote how Lady Mary Coleman, the Queen Mother's niece, was upset by the "beastly and horrid" way Thatcher was treated.

"They were talking about the Falklands and the Queen, sharply in a loud voice, said, 'I don't agree with you at all,' and Mrs. Thatcher went red and looked very uncomfortable. Lady Coleman felt the Queen was trying to put Mrs. Thatcher down, all the time knowing that she was unaccustomed to the kind of society which is upper-class and surrounds the Queen."

Yet the queen is later quoted telling a courtier that she got along with Thatcher "but like all prime ministers she won't listen."

For her part, Wyatt writes, Thatcher once observed: "The Queen doesn't have to fight an election. I do."

But away from politics, Wyatt is clearly taken with the Queen Mother, describing her as a woman who "likes clever men who make jokes.

"All intellectuals with any spirit fall in love with her immediately, prisoners to her charm and held by her intelligence and a knowledge of book," he wrote.

Wyatt was a bit more standoffish with the queen. But he was charmed when he heard her call her mother, "Mummy."

As for Wyatt's relationship with Thatcher, well, he adored her, even sent her flowers. She listened to him -- and also used him -- getting her viewpoint across in his newspaper columns.

"She's a radical making a revolution, which horrifies many Conservatives," he wrote.

As for Wyatt's journal, there's no telling how many of the great and good will be horrified. The book is likely bound for Britain's best-seller list, though it is not due for release in the United States.

Yet Wyatt could be haunting the establishment for years. "The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt" will stretch to three volumes.

Pub Date: 10/29/98