Rocking the boat
Sir: Describing the last hours that preceded the death of his master, the great and good constitutional monarch Edward VII, that equally great and good courtier, Fritz Ponsonby, wrote that 'the King then discussed an article in the Spectator which I had given him to read, and said it was excellent'. I rather fear that, in the 70 or so intervening years, few if any Spectator articles have been brought by their Private Secretaries to the attention of our Sovereigns or their heirs. It is not so much that the quality of the articles has fallen off as that the calibre of the courtiers has catastrophically plummeted. It is therefore improbable that the Prince of Wales (whom, together with his angelic, appetising and now at long last lawfully wedded Princess, God Preserve!) had the chance of seeing Simon Courtauld's candid comment (Notebook 25 July) that 'we should feel ashamed' of the 'particularly insensitive' arrangements made on his behalf to board Britannia, amid waving Union Jacks and cheering Don Pacificos originally Imported, like St George himself, from Genoa, in the bottom righthand corner of the peninsula his cousins Juanito and Sophie, most admirable of all the living descendants of Queen Victoria and King Christian IX, have been tirelessly and fearlessly fighting against all odds to make safe for democracy.
We have, of course, not yet got the final transcription of the 'black box' from this easily avoidable accident but at first glance It looks suspiciously like princely pilot error, thus regrettably justifying Auberon Waugh's reference in the same issue to his ceaseless amazement at 'the ineptitude of the Royal Family on every point where they have a say'. The Prince, it seems, simply ignored such ground proximity warnings as sounded from the direction of Whitehall and hit the Rock with full power on. To the Guardian the Palace leaked that it had been 'under some pressure from Prince Charles to use Gibraltar', as if Bronington's exskipper, conscious that Britannia. could still make, even if she can no longer rule, waves, was actually anxious to carry out a show-off singeing of the still wispy beard of Spain's constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy.
To many of us it had seemed characteristically courageous of King Juan to demonstrate his known affection for his British cousins by coming to London for the wedding as well as offering hospitality to the happy couple later on their Mediterranean cruise. The snub, if any, was surely, so long after the acceptance of the invitation by the Zarzuela, to inform the Madrid government of the Gibraltar boarding plan only hours before its publication in London. From then on, Jingo bells rang out to cover the gaffe. The Buck House Press Office, under its FO boss, firmly passed the buck from Downstairs to Upstairs with its, 'The proposal was that the Queen's son should embark on the Queen's yacht in the Queen's dockyard in the Queen's colony. That arrangement stands.' In the Commons an allegedly Liberal and allegedly European MP called King Juan 'worse than Franco'. Even my old friend and sometime Majorcan host, Sir Ian Gilmour, who normally is content to fit a recent Washington description of himself as 'being apparently under permanent mild sedation', in disclaiming responsibility for his department used demagogic language that ill accorded with my recollections of him being congratulated in Whites Club for his anti-Franco articles in the Spectator by King Juan's father. As for that worthy scourge of Stalinism and its wartime toadies, Lord Bethell, he seemed to have momentarily taken leave of his political judgment in speaking in the Lords of it being 'a shame and pity to see a fine and courageous King being so badly advised.'
Meanwhile it's an ill wind, all's well that ends well and so forth. King Juan Carlos, whose first reaction was to think that, 'with cousins in London so ill-advised as the Polo boy with a hole in his head, who needs Colonel Tejero or ETA for enemies?', has now, by his decision to chuck, for the time being outflanked the fascist Right. So that some foreign diplomats, as faithful to the conspiracy theory of history and particularly, English history as Evelyn Waugh's classic French Ambassador of fiction, now think that the Gibraltar cock-up was really kind Charles's Machiavellian wedding-day gift to his quarter-Battenberg Bourbon cousin! And there is still time for the Prince, if he hasn't lost Lucia Santa Cruz's telephone number, to draft from Broadlands a warm message of greeting to the Spanish people and their rulers to be broadcast as, in his antiquated Andover, he overflies their soil, which unless he is an even better pilot than they say, he is likely to do on approach to what Shakespeare's Fortinbras would by now have with reason called 'a little patch of land that hath in it no value but the name'. Alastair Forbes
Beefsteak Club, 9 Irving Street, London WC2
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