Royal flush
TREVOR GROVE
The Reality of Monarchy Andrew Duncan (Heinemann 36s) The ceremonial officer of the Treasury used to be British Boy Chess Champion in 1923; Lord Cobbold, the Lord Chamberlain, comes from an old Suffolk brewing family; the Lord Lieutenant of Caemarvonshire is sixty- three and 'dresses trendily in King's Road boutique clothes'; the World Cup football stadium in Rio de Janeiro was constructed with enough concrete to build a ten-storey wall along thirty-three blocks both sides of Park Avenue; Sir John Russell, tim's 'languid ambassador to Brazil', was at Eton and Trinity, Cambridge and is 'married to a Greek beauty queen Aliki Diplarz kos '
These inconsiderable and wholly footling discoveries have been made in the course of Mr Andrew Duncan's extensive probe into 'the reality of Monarchy'. I dare say Mr Duncan (thirty; educated Guernsey and California; TV scriptwriter, Royal hanger-on and I bet he won't be asked again) imagines he has taken the lid off something; well so he has, but what's inside smells more like the corgis' dinner than the rich feast one might have been led to expect. Heaven help us all if this, after all these years of imagining that we knew better than anyone else possibly could what monarchy was all about, is the reality behind it:
'On the day that an end to Nigeria's thirty. month war was announced, and the newspapers were crammed with horrific pic- tures of emaciated children, what news came from the Queen? She had given a royal war- rant to a Dutch ditch digger and, in the even- ing, played a merry joke on the King's Lynn fire brigade by initiating an alarm hoax that sent seventy men and ten fire brigades rushing to Sandringham to spray the lawns.'
Or this: The Queen and Prince Philip have been an admirable duo, popularising the Monarchy, changing its appearance, ex- quisitely justifying their nicknames, Brenda and Keith.' One marvels at Mr Duncan's insight into these matters.
Other reviewers have already expended acres of print quoting from Mr Duncan's squashy prose, but this descripition of a samba team regaling the Queen during her recent Brazilian tour will bear repetition: . . . quickening their beat as they ap- proached the residence . . . their black bare midriffs glistening with pubescent sweat under the floodlights, the indentations of their navels set in firm flesh frenziedly swivelling with year-long practice, symbolic slave chains dangling from delicate wrists and snug agile ankles ... necks jerking to the erotic, carefree, narcissistic beat, limbs caressing the sultry humidity, frivolity quickening to ecstasy as the tempo increased . . . twitching to a peak of elegiac ulula- tion.' Quaere: Can John Wells have had a hand in this?
Apart from this kind of stuff, which surely sets a new low in court reporting (vide Tilibet's blushing first meeting with Philip—six-foot, blue-eyed, fair-haired boy . . . self-confident and cheeky), the un- dignified relish with which Mr Duncan dwells on `Meg's plumpness'—or juxtaposes a mention of 'Tony' with a snide reference to queers or remarks on the Duke's dislike of intellectualt—reveals a depth of patronising
priggishness which sits ill on the lips of someone who can take no less than eighty- eight words of mumbled euphemism to describe the Queen's wanting to go to the lavatory.
One doesn't want to be entirely unfair about this book. It does contain a vast amount of extraordinary, if mostly trivial, information about the Royal household. For those with a mind to collect, or simply the curiosity to learn about, such esoteric details as what the Queen likes for lunch, why my Lord Cobbold tends to walk backwards in her presence or what the Garter King of Arms would say if you gave him a buzz (he'd say 'Garter here'), The Reality of Monarchy must be a treasure. But if one adds that the whole exercise has been carried out in a spirit of unrelieved vulgarity and only thinly disguised mockery, I trust that gentle readers will recall that all that glisters these days more often than not turns out to be tinfoil.
Previous page
