Notebook
Clever Princess Michael of Kent seems to have a knack of getting her own way. After a five-year struggle, she has finally obtained the Vatican's approval for her marriage to the Prince in Vienna Town Hall. The Apostolic Pro-Nuncio in Lon- don, Archbiship Bruno Heim, will now of- ficiate at a ceremony of blessing. This has already caused irritation among humbler Catholics who suspect that the rich and the famous have a better chance than they do of getting the Church to bend its rules, and who is to say that they are wrong? Princess Michael — the former Austrian Baroness Maria-Christine von' Reibniz — is sometimes described in the press as 'a devout Catholic'. This may be true, but she is most ecumenically inclined. Her first marriage, to poor old Thomas Troubridge, my Eton contemporary, took place in 1971 in Chelsea Old Church, which is of course not Catholic but Anglican. After their divorce in 1977, the Catholic Church granted an annulment because the couple were childless (though the Church of England refused to recognise it). But the Pope nevertheless refused to let her marry Prince Michael in a Catholic Church because the Prince insisted that their children be brought up as Anglicans to Preserve their positions in line for the throne. The Baroness must have found the Pope's obduracy both annoying and Perplexing, for, as far as she was concerned it doesn't matter which club you belong to'. In the end the Pope seems to have agreed with her. Her two children by Prince Michael are indeed being brought up as Anglicans as promised. But the Church has decided that she is not to blame for the `discriminating law' of the British Royal Family which insists that only Anglicans can accede to the throne. The Church is cer- tainly right about that. But it seems to have shown an indulgence towards the Princess that it does not necessarily show towards Catholics less light-hearted in their attach- ment to their Church.
Ilearn from Labour Weekly that a park in Hull is to be named Nelson Mandela Gardens. This is part of the present M. andela boom which was started by Coun- cillor Hugh Bayley of the London Borough of Camden. Mr Bayley's obsession with Nelson Mandela was already apparent ten Years ago when, as an undergraduate at Bristol University, he persuaded members of the Union to christen a new bar Mandela Bar'. His greatest triumph, however, came last week when the Greater London Council approved his proposal that a back street in Camden called Selous Street should be re-named after the South African anti-apartheid hero. This was a notable
breakthrough, for it is a thoroughly un- English practice to name streets after foreign heroes or, for that matter, British ones) however admirable they may be. Meanwhile, the engineers' union AUEW has named its executive committee room after Mandela, and the Labour Party has invited him to attend its annual conference this autumn, despite the fact that he has spent the past 21 years in prison and is still there. All this has happened within the space of .a few days. I suspect it is just a beginning.
T f the gratuitous changing of street names
is to become accepted practice, there is one particular street name which I would be pleased to see disappear. This is Carnaby Street, that extraordinary relic of the Sixties which still survives on ( the east side of Regent Street. Paved with cheerful decay- ing yellow and pink rubber, it remains peopled by denim-clad Germans and guitar- strumming Frenchmen buying Union Jack T-shirts and other dated souvenirs in seedy shops run by Arabs and Iranians. The air is full of amplified pop music, which would doubtless be found particularly distressing by the man after whom the street is named — the composer William Carnaby (1772-1839). Carnaby does not seem to have been much of a composer. The street was presumably named after him because he was organist round the corner at the Hanover Chapel in Regent Street. His claim to a permanent memorial in London, while obviously greater than that of Nelson Mandela, would appear to be less powerful than that of Henry Selous, the Victorian painter displaced by Mandela in Camden; for the Selous family has been prominent in
Camden for generations. So I suggest that Carnaby Street is renamed Selous Street. There is a precedent for changing the name of a street which has particularly disagreeable connotations. Following the Christie murders, Rillington Place was removed from the map of London. The name Carnaby is now permanently iden- tified with all that was shoddiest in the Six- ties, so there is a case for its removal too. The moment is also opportune. Both sides of Carnaby Street have been bought by Peachey Properties who hope to develop a higher class of shop. A change of name would assist the change of image. And it could also help to redress the wrong done by Camden to the family of Selous.
(-liven that it is the official organ of the V National Union of Journalists, the monthly paper the Journalist is a much bet- ter publication than one might expect. It is lively and well-produced and includes among its attractions John Kent's political strip cartoon Varoomshka, which until about five years ago used to appear regular- ly in the Guardian. Varoomshka is a beautiful dumb blonde who asks naive questions about politics. The Varoom- shka strip is open to criticism on the grounds that it is possibly not very funny but hardly, one would have thought, on any other grounds. However, the London Freelance Branch of the NUJ, at a meeting in the Freemasons Arms, Covent Garden, attended by 42 of its 3,000-odd members, resolved that the cartoon, 'as a classic ex- ample of sexual stereotyping, has no place in the journal of a trade union committed to fighting sexism'. As a result, the branch decided it would stop sending the Jour- nalist to its members. The episode is a distressing reminder that many people who call themselves journalists are not only hostile to press freedom but also completely mad. As John Kent points out, 'the defini- tion of "sexist" appears to be an attractive looking girl'. The Varoomshka crisis was also discussed at the July meeting of the NUJ's National Executive Commit- tee. Many condemned the cartoon, in- cluding BBC Newsnight's Vincent Hanna who pompously called it 'trivial, boring, unfunny and sexist', though he also said that the NEC should not be discussing the content of the Journalist. 1 feel sorry for the Journalist's recently appointed editor, Tony Craig, who seems a sensible fellow. In a leading article he calls the dispute 'a straightforward question of press freedom' and declares: 'Many of those who shout the loudest about the iniquities of the capitalist press and the importance of press freedom mean, of course, nothing of the sort if your views should differ from theirs.' If he goes on writing truthful things like that, I doubt if he will last for long.
Alexander Chancellor
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