Another voice
A Frenchman at the court
Auberon Waugh
Perhaps it was no more than an attack of persecution mania brought on by knowledge of my country's abject state, but I can't help wondering whether anybody else who watched the Queen receiving President Giscard d'Estaing outside Buckingham Palace last week noticed something perfunctory in the Frenchman's manner towards our sovereign? She was obviously putting herself out for him in a big way, chattering with great animation in what I am sure was excellent French. Giscard—or so it seemed to me—went through the motions of nodding once or twice while openly looking around to see if there was anybody more interesting to talk to.
At any rate, I was deeply shocked—not so much by the exhibition of bad manners, although that was interesting too, as by the lack of curiosity it revealed. Like many Francophiles of my generation and class, I had always tended to look upon Giscard as something approaching a Messiah. It is true that the French have a much better Constitution than we have—one day I shall bore everyone stiff when I unveil my thesis on how the British Constitution has shaped and fossilised those working-class attitudes which now lead ineluctably to our national ruin—but he nevertheless seemed to have achieved the impossible by emerging from within a recognisably democratic framework, as a leader of intelligence, cultivation, high principles and good sense. If Roy Jenkins is our national equivalent—and I do not, personally, rate Jenkins as high in any of these qualities as I would rate Giscardone has only to examine his chances of emergi ng as leader of anything in our present system to enjoy once again those pleasurable emotions of gentle despair which are such a solace to the contemplative mind at our present moment in history.
Like many of my generation, I feel I have shed most of those illusions which sustained Englishmen in the past—on the superiority of British workmanship, the splendour of the British working man, the abiding virtue of most British institutions, the wit, wisdom and basic human decency of Lord Hailsham, the basic human decency of the Parliamentary Labour Party etc etc. But one illusion I have always entertained was that foreigners in general—and Frenchmen in particular—are bitterly jealous of our monarchy. Obviously, this jealousy was not to be found among all foreigners, or even among all Frenchmen. There would always be left-wingers, technocrats, people suffering from some form of brain damage and other unfortunates who would loudly proclaim their repudiation of anything so irrational, old4ashioned and sentimental,
but even among these delinquent and semihuman noises one could usually detect a note of suppressed envy.
Or so I thought. And where Giscard himself was concerned—a shooting man, who knew only too well that the best shotguns and cartridges are made in London, the only grouse fly in Scotland, gentlemen don't shoot quails or even wild pigs and dress themselves in Savile Row, not at some foreign tailor with a permanent wave in the Faubourg St Honore—Giscard, surely, would fall to his knees in front of our Queen, crossing himself through his tears and uttering strange Gallic cries of delight. After all, the monarchy is now just about the only thing we have to offer in the modern world: our modern architecture is as ugly as everyone else's, our machines are even less reliable than theirs. Only the Queen and the Church of England are left, and nobody has ever shown the slightest interest in the Church of England.
Which is why it came as an ugly shock to see this Frenchman turn his back on the one remaining prop to our national self-esteem. Of course, I was already aware that my idol had at any rate a few clay toes on his nifty little feet. His own party goes out of-its way to call itself Independent Republican; on of his first actions on arrival at the Elysee was to decree that officials there should no longer recognise the picturesque 'titles' which give so much harmless pleasure to so many otherwise ordinary Frenchmen and Frenchwomen; his greater political struggle at the present time is to introduce a totally fatuous, totally unwanted capital gains tax which even the French Communist Party is opposing.
Yet undoubtedly he has made a great impact on the British public. Mrs Margaret Pringle, who conducted a survey among the crowds waiting to cheer him at Victoria Station, found that many of them thought that Valery Giscard d'Estaing was a female pop singer—surely the ultimate accolade from these pleasant, simple folk. Only the ghastly suspicion remains that, despite the fact we all put on our Sunday best, wore our most ingratiating smiles, trotted up and down in fancy dress, blew trumpets at him, showed him our House of Lords, despite the fact we even sent our happy and glorious Queen to talk French with him, Giscard d'Estaing was not impressed.
Nobody can blame the Queen. I had never seen anyone talk so much French in such a short space of time. If she had been feeling a little more generous, I suppose she might have given him a pair of Purdeys rather than an overweight black labrador bitch which won't understand French and will probably catch rabies before very long. But we must all pull in our belts nowadays, must we not ?
But if these wretched foreigners are not going to be impressed, I see no reason to inflict them on the Queen. The Royal Family is something altogether too precious and too essential to our national self-esteem to be exposed to supercilious foreign politicians who, like all politicians, are here today and gone tomorrow. Some people may even feel that the Queen has made rather a fool of herself, being seen talking so eagerly in a foreign tongue to someone who plainly didn't want to listen. Mr Callaghan has a lot to answer for. Perhaps we should let the Queen retire from the centre of the stage for a while and concentrate our attention on Princess Anne, Dame Anne Phillips, who is surely a model for the more insular Royal Family of the future.
Unlike the Queen or the Queen Mother, Princess Anne does not seem to be held in much affection by the multitude. Of all the various comments made about her acquisition of Gatcombe Park, the wisest came from Mr Jon Akass in the Sun who pointed out that the obscenity of the transaction lies in the fact that the Royal Family is fast becoming the only family in the kingdom which can afford to live in an ordinary gentleman's residence. Until this moment it is true to say that whenever I thought about the matter I felt humiliated and embarrassed that a member of the Royal Family—even one who had married a trifle unconventionally—shouldbe living in a house which was so much smaller and less splendid than my own. It seemed repugnant to the natural order of things. But the Queen's purchase of Gatcombe Park happened to coincide with one of those endearing final demands from the rating authority in West Somerset, and now I begin to see the force of Mr Akass's argument.
At no moment since the 1911 Parliament Act has the British monarchy shown the tiniest scruple of solidarity with the beleaguered English upper class. Its only concern has been its own survival. The cruellest and most unforgivable act of the present Queen's reign was her refusal to attend the great Duke of Norfolk's funeral last year. Beside that outrage her daughter's wedding to Captain Phillips was a mere prank. The only bright spot for the future, it seems to me, lies in the forlorn hope that the shade of David Ricardo still haunts Gatcombe Park, the house where he lived and where he died on 11 September, 1823. A Dutch Jew who converted to Christianity and retired to live the life of a country gentleman at quite an early age, he is best remembered for his first work, A Proof of the Depreciation of Bank Notes ( I 810), a corollary to Smith's Inquiry which establishes him as the father of British monetarists. If a little of that great man's wisdom can implant itself in the conveniently unencumbered brains of the young couple who are moving there, we may yet live to see the gallant Captain and his bride toasted in every manor house in the kingdom.
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