ANOTHER VOICE
The Prince of Wales has spurned the entire system designed to protect him
CHARLES MOORE
It is an impressive list (though, as some- one injured under category 7, I may be missing the bathos of including that partic- ular item). But all such injury would be comprehensible, even justifiable, if it were being inflicted out of raison d'etat. If the Prince talked to Mr Dimbleby in this way because he has a plan for a new approach to monarchy, one must study that plan and push from one's mind all extraneous, weak- minded thoughts, like the idea that, on Sunday at his prep school, Prince William will have heard on the radio that his father says he never really loved his mother.
A case can be made for what the Prince has done and that he knows what he is doing. The idea of royal privacy and propri- ety, of mystique and magic, remoteness and respectability, is fairly new. Until the 19th century, people accepted that their monar- chs and princes were often strikingly bad or weak. Although they lacked a popular press to inform them so widely and quickly, they expected to know about their princes' frail- ties. The people who gathered to watch the grande levee were not squeamish about pri- vacy.
Then came Victorianism, or, more accu- rately, Albertism: monarchs had to be good or, failing that, to pretend to be. The argu- ment for Prince Charles's frankness is that this period of pretence is over. His advisers say that royal personages can no longer exercise control over what is written about them, and so the only course is to be hon- est. As a result, the mystique will disappear, but the public respect for the honesty will grow. A new basis of trust between ruler and ruled will then be established.
Reluctant as one may be to admit it, there must be some truth in this argument. It was obvious even 30 years ago that the deference which kept the monarchy at such a distance from press and people was on the wane. The monarchy had to adapt to the informality of the age and the intrusive- ness of its technology. The television film Royal Family started the rot, one often hears oneself saying, but should such a film really not have been made? Could life have gone on as if television cameras did not exist? One should not forget that from the late Sixties until after the wedding of Prince Charles the royal family did exceedingly well out of its aggiomamento.
Prince Charles appears to be trying to update it some more, almost explicitly chal- lenging the Queen's belief in reticence and goading his father into breaking that reti- cence in the Daily Telegraph. His choice of a Dimbleby is interesting. Just as father communicated the essence of royalty in the first generation of broadcasting, so son has been chosen to distil the new essence in the next. And the essence appears to be this point about 'honesty'. We expected our kings to lead us into battle in the Middle Ages; today we expect them to bare their souls. It may, conceivably, work. The public reaction to the Dimbleby television pro- gramme, and the Prince's admission in it that he had been unfaithful to his wife, was surprisingly favourable.
The same may happen with the book. On this basis, even the apparently mad decision to serialise in a Murdoch paper is a shrewd move, taking the fight into the enemy camp.
But I remain sceptical. First of all, because the distance and 'magic' invented in the era of Bagehot were not so much the stuffy accoutrements of an age that has passed as the sensible accommodation to an age of democracy which is still with us. Monarchs might display their arbitrary whims when they had arbitrary power, but when power left them they had to clean up their act. If they behaved in ways which people considered discreditable, people would start clamouring to get rid of them. That is what is happening today. Why should worthless people have these privi- leges? people ask. I want them to have the privileges even if they are worthless, but I fear I am in a minority. Republicanism's strength is growing and for almost no other reason than the publicity given to unhappy royal marriages.
Prince Charles appears to think that in telling so much to Jonathan Dimbleby he is doing no more than putting his side of the story, setting the record straight after so many distortions. But in fact he has taken a huge step, breaking two vital taboos.
He has attacked his parents, which is immensely unattractive, and he has lost the advantage of deniability, which is immense- ly unwise. In other words, he has spurned the entire system designed to protect him. When the Princess of Wales co-operated indirectly with Andrew Morton, she behaved extremely badly, but not without cunning: nothing could be conclusively pinned on her. But Dimbleby's account is authorised, and the Prince cannot get away from any of it. Literally anyone can now feel justified in revealing what he or she knows — whether it be the Queen herself, some footman at a keyhole or Mrs Parker Bowles, the only participant in this saga to have behaved like a gentleman. And besides, this notion of 'honesty' will not wash. Revealing secrets and relating true facts is not necessarily the same as honesty. No public account of one side of a marriage break-up can be honest, and any- one who cannot see that is either dishonest himself, or a fool. The Prince appears to believe that, in his case, tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. Possibly, possibly, but he is only giving us the half of it, if that. After reading the extracts, one feels a sadder but not a wiser man.
One of the things about people whose marriages are breaking up is that they are obsessed with it. They find it very hard to concentrate on anything else. Self-loathing, self-pity and self-justification predominate, their proportions varying, but the self aspect remaining constant. Everything that Prince Charles is doing suggests that he is in just such a case. And if he is in such a case, he is not in the right frame of mind to work out what is best for the monarchy. How could it possibly be good for a future king to tell the world that, though well into his thirties, he married his wife only because his father forced him to?
When the royal couple separated, I wrote a column in this space which criticised the Princess for indulging her 'craving for pri- vate happiness', and ended: 'How do you know, some will object, that the Prince does not suffer from this same debilitating craving ... ? I do not know, but, since he is the next king, I do not think we should dis- cuss the matter.' Now he is forcing us all to discuss it, wrenching the conversation back, just when we hoped it might stop, to him and his woes. I see the spectre of Edward
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