Charles knows he'll win in the end. (Photo by Luke MacGregor/WPA Pool/Getty Images)
The oldest and best English joke is the length of time Prince Charles has waited — with nothing like stoicism — to become King. In their wisdom, our ancestors decided that the leadership of this nation was so minor a matter that almost anyone, so long as they refuted Rome and were the product of a family with a storied history of cousin-marriage, might do the job.
Most of us undertake thorough and detailed research when buying, say, an electric toothbrush. But when it comes to our next head of state, we don’t need to ask any questions because we already know the answer: it’s him with the ears. Dust off the crown and fetch Welby.
Sheer randomness of personnel is what makes monarchy so great. You can end up with a thug, a mystic, a gambler or, as we will eventually, a bloke who genuinely believes he can talk to plants. Greatness can be dunked into the cesspit at any moment. Royalty endures in Britain, not merely because of the pageantry, or the beauty, or its great ennobling truth, but because of its brutal, hilarious irrationality.
Republicans make the mistake of thinking the monarch rules over her subjects, when in fact she is a form of entertainment put on for her subjects, like those hardworking bears that ride motorcycles at the Moscow State Circus.
Our Royals almost understand this. “I’m not very good at being a performing monkey,” Prince Charles sadly admitted to Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994, unaware that his utter discomfort is precisely what makes him such a consistent amusement.
The monarch, her family, their flunkies, valets, chauffeurs, gardeners, manicurists, toadies, lovers, bodyguards, back-up toadies and piss-pot holders — they’re our subjects. They are more or less down on their knees at this point, existing for the increase, encouragement and maintenance of scandal, gossip and jokes. (Yes: they do fine things for charity, too.) Today’s Cromwells are usually American, and like all Republicans they fail to grasp a simple truth about the monarchy: why overthrow it when it bloodlessly overthrows itself every 25 years or so? The House of Windsor was built on a cliff edge — which is exactly where we want it.
This latest Windsorian plunge off the precipice is presented, depending on the sympathies of the storyteller, as either yet another family’s failure to assimilate an outsider, or a case of an outsider undermining that family’s domestic bliss. She stole our prince! Meghan in this version is a truculent and unsparing monster, rather than a garden-variety social climber, who, Godzilla-like, trashes our Royal city.
It is a flattering tale, in which neither the public’s gluttonous appetite for drama, Harry, nor our Crown Prince shoulders much of the blame for what’s happened. I’m not convinced that Meghan — who appears to be thoroughly consumed by a years-old argument about dresses with the Duchess of Cambridge — is really in the driving seat here. Instead, it is surely Harry in the lead; it was only when he appeared that Monday’s interview became interesting. Meghan was his convenient excuse, his getaway car, his ejector pod — in the same way that a nebulous accusation of racism is Meghan’s way of explaining why the Windsors disliked her. Both of them wanted to go. But why?
Well, it seems clear to me that Prince Harry hates his father very deeply. Watch again that moment when he says Charles stopped taking his calls. Harry’s eyes are so narrow they could be covered with a single penny. If this were the 14th century, he would be in France right now, plotting his revenge, doggedly raising an army, ready to sail back to England to seize the throne, violently torture Piers Morgan, and place the entire editorial staff of the Daily Mail in a gibbet. Alas, the 14th century is over, so Harry’s revenge is an over-bathroomed mansion in Beverly Hills and a maximum-damage television spectacular.
Surely it is oedipal fury that made Harry do this, rather than the press or racism, as he claims. How else are we to explain their move to America, where there is no racism whatsoever, and to Hollywood in particular, where, as far as I can gather, no journalists or photographers have ever been seen?
Not that much will change for them. Harry will still smile when he doesn’t feel like smiling. He will still have to mouth phrases he doesn’t understand at interminable functions. The lost Prince will continue to press through crowds of frozen faces in dire rooms, still less free to bitch and scold than the poorest Laotian peanut farmer. In short, he will have escaped into another effigy of himself. The only thing that must make it worthwhile is the knowledge that he has humiliated his father, the man who forced him to walk behind his mother’s coffin.
The roots of Harry’s rage are, however, far less important than the inevitability of such bitter feuding among our Royals. It has all happened before, and will happen again; this pair of keys comes with the property. The Oedipal skirmishing of the Hanoverians, for instance, lasted for more than a century. George I hated his eldest son, the future George II, who hated him right back. George II hated his eldest son Frederick, whose hatred for his father was only interrupted by a fatal cricket accident (well, perhaps). George III’s eldest despised his father so greatly that… you can see the picture here. The inhuman requirements of monarchical life — Virginia Woolf once compared being a royal to living like a single ant “struggling with a pebble” — make bitter squabbling unavoidable.
Even so, the griefs and frustrations and embarrassments of Charles do seem like they will stand out in the annals. Even the rare notes of sympathy he receives — such as this Washington Post column by Ben Judah — are fairly worthless. Charles, Judah writes, is not a villain. The Prince has been right about many great issues of the day. He thought the Iraq War was a bad idea. He was a green before it was trendy. Plus, Charles is broad-minded — he gives diplomatic speeches to worthy Europeans every now and then. (Judah forgets one of Charles’s key strengths: he looks authentically comfortable holding a pint of beer — once the kind of trait that swung general elections, before we discovered the joy of calling our political enemies racist.)
The problem with all this is that it does not matter if Charles is “right” about organic farming or interfaith dialogue or anything else. Nobody cares what Charles thinks — he was born to be a symbol, not a newspaper columnist.
As a father and a husband (the first time around), it is fair to say that Charles failed. Standing behind the curtains of history for decades, with all his charitable toiling undone by the simple phrase “God forbid, a Tampax”, has not left us with a dynamic, prudent Crown Prince who is capable of holding his family together. “Nobody knows,” he once moaned, “what utter hell it is to be the Prince of Wales.”
But being put through utter hell is exactly what the public wants from him, and all the rest of them, as this week has shown. Monarchy does not survive on laws and abstractions. The unfair truth is that as long as the Windsors dish up an unpleasant family disaster every generation or so, they will endure. The Firm will keep winning, even when it’s losing. That’s why Charles, when he at last dusts off the crown, will be thinking not the resentments of his son, or the cruel attentions of his subjects, but of his face on the coins.
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SubscribeLet us remember the Guardian’s trust is reputedly founded on Slavery money- is this true or is it a myth ? .
Who cares? The days when a self-selected and hypocritical elite could tell the rest of us what to think and expect us to doff our flat caps and say ‘aye aye yer honner’ will soon be gone for ever.
Democracy is coming.
Shutting both the titles would make the world a happier place!
The hypocrisy and double dealing of the Guardian’s business decisions should hardly come as a surprise.
Guardian Media Group, when it sold its 50% stake in Auto Trader to Apax Partners in 2008, used a tax-exempt shell company in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying corporation tax. GMG realised over £300 million in profit on that sale – yet paid not a sou in Corporation tax. This was all perfectly legal.
Over the years Guardian Media Group has invested hundreds of millions in offshore hedge funds. Keeping it under the radar and beyond the grasp of HMRC. Again, all perfectly legal.
And yet, the high-minded journalists of the Guardian love nothing more than thundering their disapproval of large multinationals – Starbucks, Apple, Vodafone etc – and the unnamed “super-rich” not “paying their fair share.”
Guardian columnists (especially Nick Cohen before his excommunication) regularly get their knickers in a bunch over such tax avoidance – though oddly never train their guns on their employer, the sanctimonious Scott Trust. Why do multinationals warrant such opprobrium whilst GMG escape any criticism? What, pray, is the difference? They too are not breaking laws, merely using every legal loophole they can find to their best advantage.
After the Panama Papers story brought a lot of this to light there were many (individuals and companies) who leapt to their own defence, suggesting that even their most opaque business dealings were legal – according to the letter of the law – yet that simply wasn’t good enough for Guardian journalists who sniffily pointed out that such obfuscation was immaterial. They might be legal by the letter of the law, but not by the spirit.
Hey ho, merely another chapter in the ongoing ‘do as we say, not as we do’ saga that is the Guardian’s entire modus operandi.
As I noted the other day, the Guardian is by far the most destructive publication in the UK. Its circulation is paltry, yet its influence is pervasive and pernicious. The Guardian has an “on-air” wing in the shape of the BBC. It is also required reading for the legions of metropolitan fauxialists who manage practically every quango and institution in the country. Not to mention that it is the go-to news source for the vast majority of the teaching profession.
So although circulation figures are ever dwindling, it informs the worldview of a great many people who influence the agenda and shape the country’s -and our children’s – future. The Britain hating, race-baiting, class-envy, history-revisionist, climate-catastrophising, woke, pc leftist clap-trap that we all complain about, is in large part down to the Guardian dripping its poison every day, thirstily imbibed by readers who influence and skew the national discourse.
The G’s ongoing narrative is wholly at odds with reality – they have a dystopian worldview and narrative predicated on catastrophism – it seems almost as though they are willing such a future into existence, Presumably so they can console themselves in a sanctimonious circle-jerk of “I told you so”.
The Guardian proudly trumpets “Comment is free… but facts are sacred”. Yet facts are so routinely ignored in favour of their preferred narrative that I wonder how the Editors still put out CP Scott’s dictum every day with a straight face.
And of course Comment is decidedly not Free on the Graunaid’s web-site. See how long a comment in suppport of, say, foxhunting, lasts before it is deleted.
Anyone who “donates” even a brass razoo to The Grauniad needs their head well examined. I agree with all your opinions and the facts are beyond dispute.
Ah the morality of the left . Sacrificing humans and families for reward.
This Observer/Guardian/Scott Trust kerfuffle has many of the elements of an episode of Midsomer. So many characters, plot and subplots. So many unknowns.
This article is inaccurate insofar as the Guardian barely has any reputation left to damage.
True enough.
It’s amusing to read lefty journalists that think that ink-stained wretchdom is a sacred trust. Maybe you chaps should transform the Guardian / Observer into a Church of Activism. Or something.
I remember back in ‘93 when the Observer effectively became the Sunday Grauniad. The late great Paul Johnson wrote at the time, “What do you Guard? For whom do you Observe?”.
Yes. I used to be a faithful reader of The Observer until it became clear, following The Guardian‘s takeover, that the paper’s ethos had been ruined by ‘progressive’ prejudice. It can never be the same as it was, but new ownership might change it for the better. We’ll have to wait and see.
“Moreover, The Guardian and the Trust are sitting on a £1.3 billion cash mountain, with millions added every year from donations by readers of its website and figures such as Bill Gates.”
Now that’s a story I’d like to read: where does the Trust/Guardian get most of its money? Apart from Gates, are any other billionaires footing the bill and why?
Ironically given its editorial enthusiasm for taxing the rest of us, the Trust was originally set up to avoid inheritance tax and has since been re-constituted multiple times to be more tax efficient since.
It’s money comes from owning print titles and investing in new media. It is very cash rich largely because it sold off assets over the last decade or so, including the Autotrader title for £600m.
The Autotrader was it’s saving at the time, the Guardian had 50% and flogged it off. It has no paywall but gets subs from it’s wokie readers and can always tap up the Lord Alli set for bigger amounts than the £15 a year most people would offer.
The Guardian doesn’t like talking about the Autotrader reading class these days, it considers them part of Hillary’s deplorable class of people.
Basically now it’s a glorified blog site wittering rather than reporting, with a shrunken news site and even more shrunken print version.
Having its stories circulated on Twitter/X (which they still are despite it flouncing off officially) is a two-edged sword as it acts as much as a don’t bother paying, as a come-on.
The Gardian goes cap in hand to its readers every day, telling them how poor it is and how much it needs their donations to keep going.
I was thinking of throwing my hat into the ring with an offer to buy both The Gaurdian and The Observer. Moreover, I would pledge to retain all existing staff and columnists. I would, however, make one tiny change by adding the strapline The Home Of Satire below the banner. None of the staff would get the joke, but then they don’t realise how funny they really are. There’s irony in that, as well as satire.
Try: off-guardian.org
The rush is probably the Guardian is still losing money and a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush,
Business is volatile and they are smart to take the opportunity before them.
The Guardian newspaper itself may lose money but the Scott Trust has more than enough to cover it. Guardian Media Group also includes various other profitable media businesses and a new media venture capital fund.
The simple answer is that the Trust has had a strategy of selling-off legacy media holdings for the last 15 years, including things like regional print media and local radio. Selling the Observer title is just the next step. Their online brand is already consolidated under the Guardian banner, so it makes little sense to maintain a separate Sunday operation.
The Observer seems to have made £3.4 million last year. Not very much, but still enough to make it odd that the Scott Trust might be preparing to pay the lossmaking Tortoise Media to take it away.
Still, it is clear from yesterday’s edition that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are just super, so on what grounds might anyone object to the title’s acquisition by the decidedly non-lossmaking BlackRock?