One was banned by one’s wife from watching the royal wedding. One was informed one was likely to prove too disrespectful of such pomp. Even so, one did sneak a peek. My goodness, the drivel. No cliché was left unmolested. Platitudes gushed from television presenters like faulty oil wells.
Such sycophancy is not new. Poet Laureates have famously made asses of themselves. The bar was set by Alfred Austin (1835-1913), who penned the immortal lines during an illness of the then Prince of Wales: “Over the wires the electric message came – he is no better, he is much the same.” Austin was appointed Laureate in 1896. His first official verse, Jameson’s Ride, was a patriotic ode which gave the full rumpty-tumpty treatment to the failed raid on the Transvaal by Cecil Rhodes’ acolyte.
The colonies were not to be outdone. Framed on my wall is a yellowing Government Gazette Extraordinary, published in Pretoria, announcing the death of Queen Victoria (“to the great affliction of the royal family and of all classes of Her Majesty’s subjects”). My grandfather, later editor of the Rand Daily Mail, preserved this 1901 poster, which conveys the deep sympathy of “thousands of loyal subjects in South Africa”. The High Commissioner could not assure the royal family that all South Africans were devastated by Queen Victoria’s passing. The Anglo-Boer War was still being fought.
Today royal celebrity has a global mystique. The media have never been more deferential. Once there was robust criticism, savage cartoons. On the death of George IV in 1830, The Times carried a pitiless editorial, referring to the king’s debaucheries and his “strumpet”, asking icily: “What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one sob of unmercenary sorrow?”
This would be unthinkable now. Such is the fog of royal guff that it’s hard to tell where reality shades into fantasy. In 1986, with a colleague, I wrote a mildly satirical novel called Palace, which had the simple premise that the House of Windsor had become a soap opera. Yet nothing we imagined was remotely as risqué as the Diana/Charles farrago that eventually emerged.
But in real life, or at least in public, the royals do often act out their stereotypes. Prince Philip has a reputation for being rude. I met him once; he was incredibly boorish. I saw Princess Margaret, notoriously fond of a tipple, down two whiskies in five minutes. When Prince Edward was doing a stint as a teacher at a school in New Zealand, I rang him. This is the verbatim, surreal conversation. Edward: “Just what do you think you are doing? You’ve got a right nerve. What on earth gives you the right to call me?” The readers of the Daily Mirror, I explained, would be interested in how he was getting along.
Edward: “Well, your curiosity just killed you.” I sought clarification. Edward: “In a metaphorical sense… this time I won’t do to you what I could do to you.” But he added: “I will do something. Something will happen to you. [Long pause.] Do you know what you have done?” No, I said. Edward: “Well, you have just done it!”
The next day, the news editor of a Sunday newspaper told me I could name my price if I gave him that telephone number. Rather pompously, not to say foolishly, I replied that I felt it wouldn’t be ethical. I didn’t mention that I’d looked up the school number in the New Zealand phone directory.
So next time you hear a royal “expert” pontificate, remember: this royal fantasia – or that little fragment we plebs are allowed to gawp at – is nearly all smoke and mirrors.
