High Tea at Buckingham Palace I I would be a great
pity, and quite contrary to the traditions and indeed the interests of our curious society, if nobody ever criticised the Royal Family. The Queen and Prince Philip happen to be (to put it mildly) popular. and to deserve their popularity. But they frequently do things which seem to some of their subjects quite inexcusable : like playing polo on Sunday, failing to attend the wedding of Miss G. Kelly, being civil (or alternately not civil enough) to Russian statesmen and divorced persons, and appearing with insufficient frequency on television.
But the strong feelings to which these lapses or excesses give rise are mainly of a sectional or sectarian nature; and the attacks launched on the Royal Family, whether editorially or in the correspondence columns of the press, are short-lived, tactical affairs, mere skirmishes. They are uninteresting because they are generally puerile and often have a contrived or exhibitionist air about them. 'I am sure I am not the only British mother who feels that Prince Charles is being deprived . . ' You have got to be a pretty good ass to write that sort of letter at all, and a still bigger ass to send it to the Daily Beast.
It was accordingly refreshing to read,. in last week's New Statesman, a diatribe conceived in more strategical terms. The strategy was that, as Captain Liddell Hart would put it, of the indirect approach. The anonymous writer began by drawing our shocked attention to an expensive party given at Claridges by a Hungarian for twb débutantes; 'its splendours were duly communicated to British workers, in goggling detail, by the daily press,' he wrote.
1 thought at first it was the splendours of the party he was objecting to : not to the press for duly* reporting them, to the detail for goggling, or to the British workers for reading the resultant rubbish. But it soon appeared that these splendours were illusory. 'Things,' this former bon vivant went on, 'are not what they used to be.' He spoke darkly of bad champagne, dubious caviar and village dressmakers. There is some internal evidence that he lives in a world of his own; but it is a World that gives him cause for disquiet and indignation. He sums up his misgivings as follows : 'Every all-night Party, every case of champagne. every hampert of pche de foie gras is one more proof that the Welfare State no longer exists . . . that equality is not just around the corner but receding into the remote distance.' Whether equality (whatever that means) is receding or not, It seems to be a conception infirmly grasped by the writer in the New Statesman, who buttresses his theory that things are not what they used to be with references to the social success achieved by 'even minor heiresses from Milwaukee, even junior financiers from Frankfurt, even fourth secretaries from seedy Middle Eastern Embassies.' As a frequent reader of the New Statesman, 1 can understand its abhorrence for all heiresses and particularly those who come from Milwaukee; but surely it is better, and more egalitarian, that the dubious Caviar should be sloshed down by minor rather than by major _:"Duly. adv. Rightly, properly, fitly; sufficiently; punctually.' The oncise Oxford Dictionary. t For a brief but (if 1 may say so) moving account of the uses to which empty ptte de foie gras hampers can be put in an emergency, see 7, i_r nree Weeks in the Sargasso Sea: a Personal Narrative of the Quest 1.'" Groundnuts. By Strix. (Frisby and Behurrel, 21s. 1948.) The book 44 copiously illustrated. heiresses? I can see, too, that equality, like so many other things, does not apply to foreigners, and that it is dialectically OK to describe some Middle Eastern Embassies as 'seedy,' although one cannot help wondering which they are; but again —as in the case of the heiresses—surely there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a fourth secretary, the humblest diplomat on the Embassy staff, getting a whiff of the guilty splendours? Equality would recede still farther if only Ambassadors, and non-seedy ones at that, got asked to these orgies.
In the writer's view the Queen is to blame for all the orgy- mongering that goes on; 'one move from the Palace, and the whole complex, hierarchic structure of the Season would collapse.' He blames the Royal Family for sponsoring 'an outmoded social fashion' which is 'at variance with the way of life that most of the Queen's subjects now find admirable.'
How on earth this clever chap has discovered which way of life, most of the Queen's subjects now find admirable I do not know, and I wish he would write another article and tell us what it is. But meanwhile he points out that the Royal Family 'are obliged—if we take the trouble to assert our rights—to do exactly as we tell them.' (By 'we' I am pretty sure he means the nation, not the New Statesman.) He gives royalty credit for being 'obliging'; 'it pacifies the politicians by pruning down its speeches to the barest bones of platitude; to encourage industry, it daily courts sartorial disaster by patronising English dressmakers.' I shouldn't myself have thought that the Queen's clothes were what you might call dowdy, or that Prince Philip's speeches could fairly be described as platitudinous; but this chap, as I say, does rather seem to live in a world of his own.
In his view these perfunctory concessions to 'the needs of mid-twentieth-century Britain' are not enough. 'The British people are, by now, reconciled to a monarchy whose mental horizons are bounded by Newmarket and Drury Lane; they no longer expect any positive contribution to the welfare of the community; but have they not the right to demand, in return for their annual £75,000, the purely negative virtue of social responsibility?'
He does not say what he means by 'social responsibility' nor why he considers it a purely negative virtue; but it is clearly something which he thinks the Royal Family lacks. It is not, at a guess, all that skylarking off to Nigeria and other parts of the Empire to which he objects; what get him down are 'Presentation Parties at Buckingham Palace, Royal Ascot and incessant scurryings between country houses.' He would probably' not object to the Queen visiting (say) one country house every two months, for the fresh air will do her good; it is the incessant scurrying that sets us all such a frightfully bad example. 'There will have,' he concludes. `to be some big changes at Buckingham Palace when Labour returns to power.'
Only one thing in his article disquiets me. He writes : 'Is it too much to ask, just once, that the people at the top should set something other than the worst possible example?' I do not like that 'just once.' It sounds as if we might not be going to get any more of these splendid articles, and I think that would be a very great pity. They make, if I may borrow one of the writer's phrases, 'a positive contribution to the welfare of the community.'
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