Youthful exuberance
Michael Vestey
Iwatched with growing incredulity as the furore over Prince Harry’s Nazi fancydress costume escalated towards the end of last week until, egged on by anti-royal elements, the incident seemed to take on international ramifications. Of course his choice of costume was unwise, bearing in mind that his youthful exuberance is now a target for the tabloid press, particularly the Murdoch papers, but 20-year-olds do that kind of thing as they’ve yet to grow up properly. Harry is in an impossible position: expected on the one hand to be ‘normal’ and yet berated when he does what others do, such as attending fancy-dress parties.
As the theme of the party was ‘colonials and natives’, it’s doubtful that any costume would have escaped criticism of some sort unless he’d gone as an elephant, and even then I’m sure someone would have found something to complain about. Amid the fake outrage, I wondered if a sense of proportion about the incident might be found on Five Live’s morning phone-in, present ed by Victoria Derbyshire. I was not encouraged when I heard Arthur Edwards, described as the Sun’s royal photographer, attacking Harry and trying to convince us that many people would be crying when they saw that photograph. Does he really believe this tosh? He even made the absurd and bogus point that, when the Queen marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, people watching will think it false.
It was left to John Nichol, the former RAF pilot shot down in the first Gulf war, to provide some balance among the studio guests in defending Harry and arguing that there was nothing symbolic about Harry’s choice of costume but that it was just innocent teenage behaviour. I’m glad to say that, apart from the usual crackpots, republicans and class warriors, the Five Live listeners seemed to have more common sense than many of the pundits I heard on the radio towards the end of the week. One listener said he hadn’t taken offence and wondered if the politics of envy were creeping in. A woman said her brother had been a prisoner-of-war in Germany and she wasn’t offended. A former Grenadier Guardsman said he and his contemporaries had all done silly things when they were 20. ‘But you’re not Prince Harry,’ Derbyshire sternly reminded him. The ex-soldier simply replied that there were more important things going on in the world. Would he go to a fancy-dress party in a Nazi uniform? Well, he’d been to one dressed as a U-boat commander. Another former soldier rang to say that he and his colleagues had held a Nazis and nuns party in the officers’ mess and there’d been nothing symbolic or meaningful about it. A young man of mixed race told the programme that he would love to see someone dressed in a Ku-Klux-Klan outfit at a fancy-dress party. ‘Lampoon the whole lot,’ he said. ‘Don’t be so serious about things.’ Edwards later appeared on Broadcasting House on Radio Four (Sunday) dispensing advice to Prince Charles on how to influence Harry. Reviewing the Sunday newspaper coverage of the affair, he said he agreed with the press that Charles should ‘get Harry to distance himself from the Gloucestershire set that he goes around with. They have too much money and not enough to do.’ What’s more, he added, ‘they are bigoted and racist’. I have no way of knowing if that’s the case, and I’m not sure how he knows, but it seems to me that, if Harry can’t mix with people of his own age who happen to live nearby, who can he mix with? Much of this, of course, is mixed up with inverted snobbery and it shows how potent a cocktail it can be when royalty is added. Edwards did concede that Harry did his charity work ‘brilliantly’, though allegedly his ‘Sloaney’ friends disparaged him over it.
No doubt Harry-baiting will continue now that there’s also money in it. I read that whoever sold the photograph to the Sun was paid £10,000, and Edwards, when asked on Five Live what he thought it would be worth, replied that it was nearer £100,000. One only hopes that, when Harry starts at Sandhurst in May, he has more loyal friends and colleagues in the army than he found at that fancy-dress party. Having said that, though, one wonders if today’s young army officers are as highspirited as some of those I used to know. I particularly recall having to glide into the shadows to avoid being thrown into one of the fountains at a party at Hampton Court. For Harry’s sake, we’ll have to hope they’re more serious-minded these days.
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