26 OCTOBER 1985, Page 8

ANOTHER VOICE

Three women: the Princess of Wales, Tina Brown and Mrs Tomalin

AUBERON WAUG H Iwas slightly shocked to see the Daily Mail's estimate that only 20 million people of Britain had watched Sir Alastair Bur- nett's interview with the Prince and Prin- cess of Wales on Sunday evening. What on earth were the other 35 million people doing? A handful of Trotskyists or fanatic- al Republicans might have refused to watch on principle. An even smaller hand- ful of people with servants might have been so terrified of them that they did not dare delay dinner by half an hour. Some may have been too drunk at a quarter to eight in the evening to be able to work their television sets, a few others might still have been sleeping off their Sunday luncheons. But surely the first television interview with the Princess of Wales was an occasion for all true Brits to sit down and be counted. Those who perversely chose to watch Howard's Way on BBC1 or (still worse) Russell Harty's meeting with Quen- tin Crisp in New York on BBC2 shall hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks that watched with us upon that day.

And this delightful national occasion was entirely the work of my old friend Tina Brown. Tina's article in the October issue of Vanity Fair 'The Mouse that Roared' was dismissed by the press office of Buck- ingham Palace as a farrago of warmed-up gossip inventions. Various newspapers used the excuse of describing it as a vicious attack on the Princess in their news col- umns to reproduce large chunks of it without, I imagine, paying serialisation fees. Briefly, Tina became a hate figure in half the saloon bars of Britain among people who knew nothing about her and had certainly never read the article. The interesting thing was that nobody really knew how much truth there was in the brilliantly convincing portrait she drew, but everybody felt she had no business to draw it, and especially not for the benefit of the Americans. This was something worse than the notorious Oxford Union King and Country debate which, as we all know, precipitated the second world war. . . .

Then it became known that the Prince and Princess of Wales planned to appear on television to rebut Tina's 'charges and correct the image of them which she had projected. I could not believe it. All my life I have been arguing that the power of the press is a myth: few enough people believe what they read, and even fewer pay the smallest attention to press campaigns, ex- cept to do the opposite. Yet here we had the Prince and Princess of Wales solemnly sitting down to answer my old friend Tina's article in an American glossy magazine, paragraph by paragraph (although never mentioning it by name) for 40 minutes of riveting television: it was not true that Wales was being 'pussy-whipped from here to eternity'; the Princess has never been on a diet, enjoys the music of Grieg and Schumann, is not much in- terested in clothes, particularly enjoys watching her husband play polo and has an exceptionally cordial regard for her sister- in-law Princess Anne, Mrs Mark Phillips. Both prefer fish, but neither is a vegetarian in the strictest sense. It is not true that the Prince of Wales has consulted a ouija board to make contact with Lord Mount- batten. He does not even know what a ouija board is. He merely believes in keeping an open mind about paranormal phenomena. 'What I find infuriating is that it should be reduced to this level of absurdity.'

As the Prince astutely pointed out, as soon as one gang of journalists has con- trived to put the royal couple on a pedestal, another gang comes along which is concerned only to knock them off. The new idea that we should be allowed to watch them climb back again provides an unprecedented and previously unimagin- able bonus. As far as I am concerned, they jolly well succeeded. But what neither of them seems to appreciate is that the joy of having a royal family consists in both operations — putting them on a pedestal and knocking them off.

We all knew that the Princess of Wales was beautiful and charming. Many sus- pected that she was also kind, with a touching and utterly genuine feeling for terminal patients, handicapped children and others. What I had not been so prepared to find was a young woman of formidable intelligence. I would not care to have her as an enemy. There is something almost scary in how brilliantly good she is at her job. But Tina is also very good indeed at hers. I cannot believe I am the only person in the country prepared to love them both.

From these two beautiful and talented young women, both with the world at their feet, to the female literary editor of the Sunday Times may seem an unfortunate step, but Mrs Claire Tomalin also feels that she has been misrepresented in print, as readers of the Spectator may be aware. Her persecution of me through the Sunday Times lawyers has caused such old and valued friends as Richard Ingrams to enter- tain serious doubts about my sanity. Perhaps a thirst for justice is indeed the sure sign of madness, as he argues. I must admit, having ridden rather a high horse about my belief in the ultimate common- sense of British juries, that I can think of few jury trials I have attended where the verdict has seemed the right one. As be rightly surmises, my chief objection to his cowardly settlement of this libel action is that for two years I have been rehearsing speeches in front of the looking glass in my bathroom. Every gesture, every pregnant cough, every withering aside was prepared — entirely on his assurance that he would fight the case.

Tomalin is a woman who spends her time taking the Booker Prize seriously, deciding for herself what novels should be considered 'serious' or 'important' or 'liter- ature'. Nothing could be more repugnant than that such a woman should actually have some influence on the clean and beautiful mainstream of English letters by preventing me from publishing, in ten years' time, another volume of Private Eye Diaries. So I shall not on this occasion take up my vigil in a shabby overcoat outside the Law Courts. Instead I shall publish these orations, In Tomalinam, from time to time to the conscript fathers of the Spectator readership. They will appear at irregular intervals, so that people cannot ask themselves, with Cicero: `Quo-usque tandem abutere, Tomalina, patientia nos- tra?' — or cancel their copies in advance. However, I might in fairness provide a schema: In Tomalinam I: concerning the nature of Lesbian love, and whether or not this is nowadays regarded as odious, ridiculous or contemptible by right-thinking people. In Tomalinam II: concerning the ethics of journalism, and whether it is wrong, odious, ridiculous or contemptible, for editors to seek to influence what they publish. In Tomalinam III: concerning the ordin- ary meaning of certain words and phrases in the English language. In Tomalinam IV: concerning the Eng" lish idea off humour, the dangers of pomposity and self-importance.