AS I WAS SAYING
Something I said made the Prince of Wales put his head in his hands, but I think I've been proved right
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
Should the Prince of Wales break the habit of his adult lifetime and start keeping his mouth shut? I was going to give my answer to this question a few weeks ago but, for reasons which have been gone into elsewhere, circumstances intervened to make this impossible. With another set of more welcome circumstances — i.e., being invited to write regularly for The Spectator — having made it possible again, I hope it is not too late still to have my say.
Media commentators who would die rather than keep their mouths shut are, of course, the last people to recommend to the Prince a course of action which they would never think of taking themselves particularly as for years most of them have been encouraging him to talk his crown off. For Sir Ludovic Kennedy, of all people, to press the Prince to go back into his royal shell — as he did recently in a letter to the Times — really was a bit rich since, except for John Grigg, no one has done more to entice him out of it.
That, however, has never been my line. From the very beginning I thought the Prince's penchant for speaking his mind a great mistake. At a small lunch which he gave at Kensington Palace for editors years ago — long before he was in trouble over his marriage — I made so bold as to tell him so to his face. My advice was for him to stick more to the conventional royal paths of public service where it was almost impossible to put a foot wrong. 'Allow tra- dition to be your guide, Sir,' I said. 'Dare to be dull.' Only the French', I added, 'have ever got rid of a monarch for being too bor- ing.'
Although this was meant to be a working lunch, fine wines had flowed — hence my inexcusable cheekiness which would have indeed deserved a royal reprimand. But the reaction was very much more extreme than a reprimand. To my dismay the Prince buried his head in his hands, as if the prospect of sticking to the conventional paths of royal public service was simply too awful to contemplate. Then, looking up, he said, in a voice of the greatest possible bleakness, that if what I meant was that he should spend the rest of his life launching ships and opening bazaars, it would have been better if he had never been born.
Never shall I forget the passion with which these words were spoken. It was indeed a cri de coeur, and the lunch broke up shortly thereafter. At the time I greatly regretted upsetting the Prince, and found his almost desperate determination not to be deterred from blazing his own individual trail very moving. Maybe it did not show that his youthful head was screwed very tightly on to his shoulders, but it certainly showed that his youthful heart was in the right place. In other words, my advice had not been so much wrong as badly timed. To tell a young man of mettle to dare to be dull is as much a waste of breath as to tell an old dog to learn new tricks.
That lunch, however, seems years ago, and I can't help wondering whether the prospect of leading a conventional royal life, doing good by stealth behind the scenes, seems to the Prince quite as unac- ceptable now as it did then. Is it too much to hope that he may be beginning to realise that the prospect of spending the rest of his life endlessly upsetting apple-carts is even more unacceptable? In any case, surely opening bazaars and launching ships is a caricature of what traditional royal life has to be. His great work in the inner cities fits perfectly into the traditional mould. So could his love of buildings and interest in the arts, if less provocatively pursued. True, the media would not be as interested if it was not provocatively pursued, but would this matter? The Princess Royal seldom makes headlines nowadays, but nobody supposes she is not doing a magnificent job.
Worthy low-profile good works do win out in the end, but only so long as the pub- lic's quiet appreciation of them is not con- stantly put at risk by high-profile storms and stresses. That is where the Prince goes so wrong. He allows his worthy side to be constantly upstaged by his sensational side. Given the Prince's questing character, it won't be easy for him to carry on with the former while cutting out the latter. But this is what his friends ought to be advising hint to do, and this time, Sir, instead of burying your head in your hands, do please open your ears.
Whenever I see reports in the press of one schoolboy on trial for killing another — not exactly a frequent occurrence but by no means all that rare — my mind goes back to pre-war conditions when such hor- rors were quite unthinkable, as I found to my cost when a fellow schoolboy of 12 threatened to kill me. Needless to say, I was scared out of my wits by the likelihood of meeting a violent death — strangulation by an outsized Van Heusen detachable shirt collar was to be the chosen method. But even more frightening was the certain- ty of being called a liar by the headmaster if I reported the threat. I knew the boy meant business. But I also knew, with even more dread, that no grown-up would ever believe me.
It was an awful dilemma which lasted through the best part of one whole summer term. The would-be murderer, who was much larger and stronger than me, would practise the method of execution in the woods, each day tightening the collar around my neck a little bit further. Unable to bear the strain any more, I ran away, catching the train from Dorking to Water- loo, where fear of maternal incredulity made me take refuge in the station's round- the-clock news theatre. Nor were my fears proved unfounded, in spite of my mother being a leading light of child psychiatry. The headmaster, for his part, summoned to London for a midnight meeting, had no hesitation in denouncing me as a schoolboy fantasist.
In the event, however, I was vindicated. After belated enquiries, the boy was discov- ered to have a long record of violent men- tal instability in his native Argentina. No word got into the press, of course. In those days such things were hushed up. It took another half-century or so before they became common knowledge. Now any schoolboy with a story like mine to tell finds only too much credulity, if not from his headmaster or parents then certainly from the News of the World.
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