Another voice
Lessons of the Royal Wedding
Auberon Waugh
Languedoc, France One would like to think the French had derived some permanent benefit from the Royal Wedding. So far as one can tell, the entire French nation watched it. Every Frenchman and Frenchwoman I meet Speaks of it as one of the most emotional occasions of modern history, and it almost seems as if nearly 200 years after their abominable revolution, the French are beginning to have second thoughts. Yet this same nation has just elected a socialist President and socialist Chamber of Deputies for the first time in 25 years. It may seem incomprehensible to us that anyone of the slightest intelligence or benevolence towards the human race can Still profess to believe in socialism, seeing the miserable havoc and poverty it creates whenever it is tried. But the inescapable fact remains, to be explained as best one Can, that this supremely intelligent and, in my experience, entirely benign race has Chosen to express its contempt for all men by governing by this means. So far, the only result has been to devalue the franc against the pound. With every day that passes, an extra frog's leg or snail lands 'Du my plate without the slightest effort on my own part. The general conclusion must be that French socialists are not nearly so depraved as our own. Mitterrand, as a Person, seems less objectionable than Giscard. I wonder if that half of what we laughingly call our Shadow Cabinet which hoycotted the Wedding drew any conclusions from the fact that Mitterrand, who had actually won an election, attended. The week of the Royal Wedding cannot have been a happy time for socialist politicians Waiting in the wings. No doubt, in time, national disgust at the Conservatives — at Mr Heseltine, for his horrible postures in Liverpool, at Mr Walker, for the spectacle of his naked ambition, or at Mrs Thatcher, for her mean and obstinate attitude towards Mr Worsthorne — will reassure them that the Country is indeed ready for the exciting experience of civil war which they promise US. But it must have been a depressing thing to see all those happy, half-witted, cheering faces in the crowd.
Even in America, which has just elected the man who, I am convinced, will prove the l'eatest and best President of my own lifetime, and where our Wedding was also followed with rapt attention, the message does not seem to have got through. I cannot have been alone in noticing how Mrs Reagan, on being presented to the Queen at a polo match just before the Wedding, Pointedly refused to curtsey. She is, of Course, a woman of humble origins and may not have known any better. Or she might have been hinting that she was a Daughter of the American Revolution (which as a jumped-up chorus-girl she most certainly isn't). Or perhaps, like so many wives of even the greatest men, she is quite simply mad. But I prefer to think she was suffering from the same residual loyalty to her own country's revolution as the French evince when, on public occasions, they still pretend to believe that liberty and equality are reconcilable aspirations, or that either necessarily makes for happiness.
Something of this ancient, irrational urge may be understood by Englishmen when we analyse the extreme irritation we felt on learning — with this new concentration on the affairs of the Royal Family — that the children of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent have somehow been allowed to assume the style of younger son and daughter of a duke (or marquess). I do not know what pipsqueak in the Lord Chamberlain's Office or the College of Arms assured them that they had this right, but they don't. Mr and Miss are the proper styles, although after that they can call themselves anything they like. A special Royal ordinance authorising the practice would have been dubious enough, but for a junior member of the Royal Family to assume the style of a nobleman's younger son in this way is to spit in the face of Magna Carta. Possibly neither Prince Michael nor his bride has ever heard of Magna Carta, but if I were a baron, let alone a duke or a marquess, I should certainly take this usurping couple to Runnymede and dunk them both in the river which runs around that historic meadow.
Which may explain why intelligent and respectable Frenchmen still stand to atten .
Ferdinand Mount is on holiday. tion for La Marseillaise, why Nancy Reagan refused to curtsey to the Queen. But the most sombre lesson of the Royal Wedding concerns the future, not the past. Ever since becoming a father, more than 19 years ago, I have tried to convince my children that if they neglect their studies they will end up as road-sweepers or lavatory attendants. If, on the other hand, they apply themselves diligently enough to all the absurd and humiliating subjects in the modern child's syllabus, achieving satisfactory 'A' levels in biology, physics, 'modem' mathematics, 'Nuffield' latin, the theory and practice of positive anti-racialism, the political, philosophical and economic framework to a non-smoking policy, creative modelling in plasticine etc — then, if they are boys, they will become rich and famous like their father and grandfather before them; if they are girls, they will marry if not the Prince of Wales, at any rate a marquess, a duke or one of the better class of earls.
Even if I could think of a single unkind thing to say about our new Princess of Wales I would refuse to say it in deference to her beauty, birth and obvious amiability of temperament, but the fact remains that she has not got a single pass at '0' level GCE and on that rock the whole ship of state looks like sinking. The Prince of Wales, in choosing such a mate, makes a statement of greater importance than if he had chosen to marry a girl of average educational abilities who was either black or working-class. What he is saying, in effect — and instructing all his dukes and marquesses down to the meanest citizen in the land — is that education is no longer of the slightest use or interest to the modern Briton.
In a sense, of course, he is right. In a society where the long-distance lorry driver earns more than the university professor, the ancillary technician in hospital more than the consultant surgeon, who needs education? A chimpanzee can be trained to perform most of the functions of the 'worker' in a modern factory, and would probably perform them with better grace.
The error in this is to suppose that education prepares people for employment rather than unemployment. Present figures for unemployment are not the product of a temporary recession, still less of the Government's non-existent 'monetarist' policies. They are the inescapable and permanent result of technological progress. The greatest challenge facing our civilisation — as opposed to the dragooned and regulated societies of the East — is the challenge of leisure. Even the lower classes grow intolerably bored with television after a time. Music is already surging ahead and literature, I feel sure, will revive once it has been taken away from the Arts Council and learned to address itself once again to its readers. Education is the key to everything. If the Prince is too busy himself he should appoint a tutor to instruct his young bride in music, dancing, poetry and all the gentler arts. If Lord Goodman's health is not up to the job, I will volunteer for it myself.
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