LONDON: Imagine you are the Prince of Wales, on a British Airways flight to Hong Kong. Paddy Ashdown (a former leader of the Liberal Democrats), you notice, is in first class. Beside him sit former Tory ministers so antiquated that a harsher man might call them the ‘appalling old waxworks’ of British politics. You, the future king, are strapped to an airborne piano stool that you dimly identify as a club class seat. You do not demand an upgrade or complain. You merely note in your diary that ‘such is the end of empire’. It is supposed to be a joke.
A wan try perhaps, but Prince Charles’s account of the Hong Kong handover, as revealed last week in the High Court, was a wry insight into his world. It is a stuffy place, mothballed in nostalgia but much less pompous than the British media. Not since Samuel Pepys was charged with being a Jacobite has a diarist been so unfairly painted as a menace to the realm.
For now, the fuss is over. Mr Justice Blackburne may (and, on the legal issues, should) send the prince’s complaint that the Mail on Sunday breached his confidentiality to jury trial. If so, the Queen is likely to urge her son to drop a case that has lifted a lid on much more than goosestepping troops and inferior airline seats. In some ways, though, the hearing told us nothing. Charles sends ‘black spider’ memos to ministers. So what? He has been doing that for 30 years. He sees himself as ‘a dissident’. Fine. He is a nonconformist. Lonely, quixotic and, up close, rather nice, he is a certified outsider.
Once, he was almost ushered in from the cold by Mark Bolland, his former deputy private secretary and the man whose damaging witness statement the prince’s advisers hoped vainly to suppress. In the wake of Diana’s death, Bolland increased Charles’s popularity rating from 20 to 70 per cent. He set up an interview with Ant and Dec, in a publicity stunt. He made Camilla Parker Bowles a queen in waiting. In short, he let the Prince of Wales look human.
While Bolland is a clever and charming ally, he makes an uncomfortable foe. Rumours that he was aggrieved by not being offered a gong on his departure do not sound right. The likelier cause of his pique is the animus between him and Sir Michael Peat, Charles’s current private secretary and an old-style courtier who, not for the first time, finds himself at the eye of a very modern storm.
What, Clarence House (the official London residence of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall) argues, could it have done but go to court to head off publication of another seven ‘stolen’ diaries of Charles’s foreign tours, leaked by a disenchanted employee? Palace sources say the toothpaste-squeezers of the prince’s household are constantly offered financial ‘seductions and inducements’ by the media. Nor, they assert, did Charles circulate his first draft of Hong Kong history as if he were a one-man amazon.com. Only 14 people read it.
However persuasive, this is not the main point. The wider argument centres less on the size of the prince’s book club than on whether he should have views at all. Many deplore his quasi-political dabbling. But why, when civil liberties and freedom of speech are so cherished, should the future head of state forfeit such protections? That Charles, ridiculously, reviles the Human Rights Act is no reason to deny him its most basic tenets. Beside, silence is much more pernicious than openness.
The current fuss is really about Britain’s compact with its future head of state. That deal, as outlined by some parliamentarians, goes like this: we pay the prince a fortune in return for never bothering us.
Trappism is the accepted way to run a British constitutional monarchy. It worked for the Queen, who, as constitutional expert Robert Hazell points out, has retained respect without displaying charisma or warmth. Her son, once king, will have to restrict himself to the Walter Bagehot list of advising, warning and being consulted by the prime minister. Any unconstitutional remarks and the monarchy, pundits say, will implode.
That sounds implausible. An institution that has withstood toe-kissed duchesses, Afrika Korps wear, butler trials and the posthumous allegation that Charles was trying to kill Diana in a car crash is unlikely to be demolished by an unwise missive about GM beetroot. Since the public is not, so far, demanding a republic, democracy needs a better monarchy.
Instead, Charles stands to inherit an institution enshrining sexism, religious bias and outrageous privilege. The government says nothing, because muteness serves its interests. The prince’s office long ago sought, and got, assurances that his memos to ministers could not be revealed under the Freedom of Information Act.
This complicity suits both sides. The powers of executive government flow from the royal prerogative, under an arrangement that sidesteps parliament and gives ministers powers including declaring wars and signing treaties.
Charles needs to demonstrate progressive thinking. For a time, enthusiasm for the New Deal bound him to Gordon Brown, but there are rumours that the relationship has cooled. The only certainty is that the bond between King Charles and the prime ministers of his day will be fraught, whichever party they head. If the prince wants to make a difference, he must now be more strident than ever.—Dawn/The Observer News Service
