CENTRE POINT
The House of Windsor is incorrigibly bourgeois.
Deep down, they like the publicity
SIMON JENKINS
The year is AD 2020. Thanks to science, Queen Elizabeth is still on the throne. Strolling along Piccadilly, I am accosted by two colourful characters familiar to habitués of that great street. A shuffling old gent catches at my sleeve. 'I say, do you want to know about my awful father and mother?' he says with a pleading look. I shake him off. He is persistent. 'I could tell you about my miserable marriage?' No, thank you. 'Or my views on the SDP?' A scrawny bag-lady joins in. 'Don't believe a word he says,' she screams. 'He tells lies. He had lovers, you know. I knew. But so did I. I have letters to prove it. Here.' She scrabbles frantically in a limp plastic bag. I try to move on but they pursue me towards Green Park. The Prince and Princess of Wales have at last become batty tramps. Reporters no longer interview them. Spe- cial Branch no longer cares for them. They are pointed out to tourists as quaint British eccentrics.
I do not follow soap operas. When peo- ple plunge into the latest Archers plot I move away. So it is with the royal family. I groan at another bumper episode in the saga of that domus horribilis, the House of Windsor. The 600 pages of Jonathan Dim- bleby's Prince of Wales look from the advance promotion like another catastro- phe for the family's public relations. The newspaper extracts might have been penned by Edward Albee. I have had enough of this Who's-Afraid-of-Virginia- Woolf-on-Thames.
The Prince's latest act of deliberate pub- lic introspection certainly suggests an unsound mind. The permitted intrusion on his privacy is astonishing. Both the Prince and his wife now seem driven by Furies. Both are suffering from an acute attack of slighted-spouse syndrome. The symptoms are a loss of any dignity and a craving to tell the world one's own side of the story. Both seem to find an eerie comfort in the scald- ing sauna of publicity.
The Prince refuses to have the Murdoch press anywhere near his house. Yet he invites the no less leering curiosity of the public by handing his private papers to Mr Dimbleby. The one hilarious facet of the affair is the belief of his advisers that in a `proper' book his high seriousness would outweigh tittle-tattle about the marriage. On what planet do they live? From the moment Mr Dimbleby popped his devastating ques- tion on television, we have had this Hercule Poirot lurking behind every Palace door. His obvious intention was to get to the bottom of the Great and Royal Sin. He has succeed- ed. `Excusez-moi un moment, Your High- ness, I zink you are not faithful to ze Princess Deeana, no?' The reply came with that agonised Royal Look. 'Gad, Poirot, you don't half put a chap on the spot. Well, out with the handcuffs. I confess all.'
Mr Dimbleby was within his professional rights to ask the Prince about his fidelity to his wife. This was no foot-in-door inter- view. I still think the Prince was wrong to answer it, other than with a dignified refer- ence to his family's privacy. The honesty may have yielded a 'truth dividend', but I believe this will prove short-lived. In time the 'indignity dividend' will outstrip it, not least abroad where his apparent kowtowing to media intrusion is incomprehensible. Rather than firmly push the telephone tap- ping, the bugging and telephoto lens beyond the pale, the Prince accorded such activities some validity.
I find it incredible that anybody could wel- come as determined a journalist as Mr Dim- bleby into their most private thoughts, apparently without a contract to edit both the timing and the content of publication down to the last comma. A television researcher was allowed to roam through let- ters and intimate diaries at Windsor without let or hindrance. No ban was placed on the disclosure of painful dealings between Prince Charles, his parents and his wife.
The Prince cannot now complain of com- petitive media intrusion into every detail of his private life. The damage of an autho- rised biography seldom lies in the work itself. As the Princess found on publication of 'her' Andrew Morton book, the poison is in the spoilers, in the challenge which such favouritism throws down to the ratpack. Advisers have long pleaded with the royal family to avoid publicity, not to talk to the press, to eschew cameras and public places `What, this old thing?' — to concentrate on the monarch's role as head of state. Such pleas have little effect. Even the Duke of Edinburgh was this week unwisely sucked into the revelatory mael- strom.
Perhaps there is substance in the old gibe that the House of Windsor is incorrigibly bourgeois. Deep down, they like the public- ity. They read the Daily Mail. They are comfortable in their humiliating imprison- ment by highfalutin courtiers and Special Branch policemen — despite the notorious indiscretion of the latter. True aristocrats would never go about with personal detec- tives, or read tabloid newspapers, or show their diaries to journalists.
But true aristocrats would never qualify as modern monarchs. Monarchy is bourgeois. It is about publicity and the management of image. What the Prince of Wales set in train this week may have been high-risk and even misguided. But it was of a piece with his concept of the monarch as public personality `in the round'. That is why I doubt he will ever end up as a Piccadilly tramp, even if his wife disappears into limbo.
Assuming he survives his mother, the Prince will end up as king. He is next in line to the throne. He will be a good king, a king for the times. He is good at being royal. He knows his place. When it comes to shaking hands, making speeches, keep- ing out of politics, being concerned and gracious, he knocks spots off any politician in the land. If this should require a change in the law, then change there will be. If he wants a new coronation oath, a new oath he shall have. If he wants to eschew the head- ship of the Anglican church, let him. If he wishes to divorce and remarry the lady of his choice, fine. Monarchs may not have much sovereignty these days, but they are entitled to handle the constitutional small change of their succession. Heredity happens to be how Britain chooses its head of state. Nobody has sug- gested a better way nor does public opinion want one. Historians can witter to their hearts' content about precedents, about George I or George IV or Edward VIII. Precedents exist to be broken. Sometimes the smash is spectacular. I still believe the Prince will look back on this phase life as a passing horror. It has no constitu- tional significance, however much effort goes into proving the contrary. of his rt Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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