Does Prince Philip Cheat at Tiddlywinks?
By STRIX T is almost a tradition in England that very 1 plain women discover, early in life, an affinity with horses; and it is thus natural that her sub- jects should view with an indulgent if not perhaps a truly sympathetic eye Queen Elizabeth Ws ob- session with the Turf. What few of them suspect (save only for the fact that the Duke of Edin- burgh cannot read, no Palace secret is more closely guarded) is her morbid passion for publicity. A' well-loved Cabinet Minister was telling me only the other day that the destinies of the Commonwealth and Empire are con- stantly being jeopattlised by the Queen's inability to tear herself - away from her press-cutting albums for long enough to affix her signature to some State paper. Even the janissaries of the Court, in their tweed frock-coats, are disturbed by this. It is not enough, as the Duke of Bedford reminded the College of Heralds at their recent Speech-day, to get your name into the papers, however regularly and with whatever promin- ence; and the Queen's growing unpopularity with Mr. Kingsley Martin and other important sec- tions of the community— But flippancy is creeping in, and it is one of the rules of this boring game that, when denigrat- ing the Royal Family, one must preserve an owl- like solemnity. One is writing with deep convic- tion, and if one is middle-aged this conviction is the deeper for having had so long to mature.
The Queen, like her forebears, has been 'in the news' ever since she came to the throne; and when a journalist in regular employment launches an attack on the Monarchy, it is most desirable that his diatribe should bear the hall mark of spontaneity and should appear to be the expres- sion of stalagmitic sentiments which, strive as he will, he can no longer repress.
Otherwise people will say : 'If you feel so strongly on this important matter, why did you not say so before?' In this context the memoirs of the better class of defecting Communist can be recommended as offering useful guidance.
,* But there are pitfalls on all the paths to fame, and on this particular short cut they are few, shallow and innocuous. If you write a criticism of a book or a play, you are supposed to have some sort of vague qualifications for doing so.. The only qualification you need for criticising the Queen is to be one of her subjects; criticisms by foreigners are rank bad form, cut no ice and don't count.
The Sovereign's subjects are, by convention, loyal, and a certain breach of protocol, if of nothing more fundamental, might seem to be involved if I, as one of them, wrote for gain an offensive article about the Queen, especia113/' if I did it at the behest of a foreigner. But there is of course nothing incompatible between loyalty —the truest kind of loyalty at that—and the frank expression of personal opinions about the Sovereign to whom I owe it.
I would make this quite clear to the numerous people (professional sycophants to a man) who would accuse me of a gross and unpardonable breach of taste. I would explain that it was because of my loyalty that I felt impelled to bring certain facts and opinions to the attention of the world. Were it not that I revered the Monarchy as an institution and admired the Queen enor- mously as a person, I should not have found it necessary to point out that she was an inept ruler, a misguided mother and a very truiderate linguist. As for my suggestion that Prince Philip was in- different to grand opera and had a bad seat on a horse, -well, surely free speech is the very essence of democracy. And so on. I said earlier that attacking the Queen was a boring game, and I think it is. One reason—the most obvious—is that it is one-sided. If Mr. Priestley writes an unkind article about a book by Mr. Evelyn Waugh, or Mr. Kenneth Tynan dismisses as beneath contempt a play by Mr. William Douglas Home, we await with interest the riposte. But criticism of the Royal Family is a strictly unilateral affair, like heckling a tele- vision programme, and this .lends it an air of unfairness and unreality.
The unreality is enhanced by our knowledge that, although to be rude about the Queen is on paper a bold, quasi-rebellious undertaking and gives the critic in headlines all over the world the status of a sort of Robin Hood, it is in fact as safe as houses. Although Regina is a party to cases in the criminal courts, she could hardly bring a civil action for libel before one of her own judges. The Queen cannot even raise an eye- brow in retaliation; and the critic can pretty well rely on the more extreme of her supporters mak- ing asses of themselves while publicly foaming at the mouth.
But what, more than anything else, makes the new vogue for cashing in on iconoclasm tedious as well as distasteful is the frivolity of the criticisms and their lack of substance. It is a well- established convention that 95 per cent, of the generally glutinous but occasionally rancid twaddle about the Royal Family which in the normal course of business is printed every week in this country has no serious pretensions to accuracy. But not even this convention, can be stretched to obscure the central fact about the Royal Family, which is that the Queen and Prince Philip discharge their public *duties with diligence and imagination and conduct . their private lives with gaiety, decorum and good taste.
Lacking serious charges to bring against them, the critic is thus obliged to fall back on what amount to personal remarks. He finds fault with the Queen's diction or her taste in clothes; he deplores, in a general and- anonymous way, her choice of a personal staff or implies that she is bringing up her children foolishly. It is really a sort of confidence trick. He takes the small change of universal gossip—the sort of unkind, unsubstantiated nit-picking to which almost every household subjects its neighbours—and inflates it into what simple foreigners are encouraged to recognise as the makings of a constitutional crisis.
The critic does this by a use of hearsay which is perhaps the least attractive aspect of his tech- nique. He does not say:- 'I cannot stand the Queen's hats' or 'Prince Philip's speeches bore me stiff.' He attributes these reactions to unspecified but by implication enlightened sections of the community, and he relies extensively on innuendo ('Even her warmest admirers would probably admit—though not of course in public—that . . .'). I cannot help feeling that, if you want to make personal remarks, you ought to make • them in person.
But it is an easy game to play. The rewards, in terms of reclame if of nothing more material, are generous; and as far as I can see you cannot lose. At least, you cannot lose anything that yoU have not lost already if you decide to play the game at all.
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