Кралски работи и клюки - октомври 2019

It’s taken Prince Charles 30 years to learn how to play the royal game. Just saying, Harry...
camilla long

By far the most fascinating royal documentary last week was the hour devoted to Prince Charles and the Duchy of Cornwall on Thursday. I know, I know — I use the term “fascinating” loosely: it wasn’t interesting at all. But that was the point. Its purpose was to put you so far into a deep and satisfying luxury goods coma that you’d find yourself congratulating him for overcoming his immense setbacks as a poor, benighted prince and for raking in as much as £21m a year to line his own pockets via “heritage vegetables” and woke gin.

You’d begin to fall in love with the funny old heritage vegetable himself, for treating his tenants with such quaint kindness and generosity, giving them jobs and showering them individually with gifts and cheques, like George III, who showed astonishing “knowledge of even the lowliest appointments”, to quote Pitt in the play. It turns out that if you live on his land and you suffer any difficulties, Charles will personally send you a countess (in this case the Countess of Arran) to discuss your mental health problems. Twenty minutes into the programme, I was fully ready to give up my life attacking the royals in London and move to Bodmin to deliver lambs as part of his hilarious personal “passion project”.

It reminded me how the monarchy doesn’t modernise by being modern — it modernises by telling us how very, very old it is again and again. It’s Prince Charles staring meatily at the horizon mumbling about “squirrels” and working the land “in his spare time” (yes — I even believed this), not attending some gender-equality round-table or defending one’s use of private jets or explaining how one’s life has been ruined by cameras while staring down the barrel of an actual camera.

It’s not that I don’t feel sorry for Harry and Meghan, or that I don’t sympathise with some of their feelings. But their lack of savvy gets worse by the second. The unsubtle way in which they clatter out their messages — if by “modernising the monarchy” they mean turning it into a disposable and crass neophyte circus of overshare, then, yeah, Preach’n’Leech definitely managed that one with their Africa documentary last Sunday. Do we really need their level of truth-telling and searing honesty?

On Tuesday, someone close to the couple — possibly Meghan’s American PR guru — had the further stupidity to telephone CNN to explain that not only had they “single-handedly modernised the royal family”, the royal family itself was surrounded by “afraid” and “inexperienced” flunkies who had no idea how to “deploy and harness the value” of the royal couple. I like to think that it was at this point the Queen decided to ask a courtier to remove the picture of Meghan and Harry that had been sitting in pride of place in her room at Buckingham Palace, because as an out-of-touch, fusty, timid old grandmother, she clearly has no idea how to deploy devastating PR messages.

The Queen has always felt it is better to show — or as she might put it, shew — rather than tell. She knows that the clothes, the tours, the gush — none of it bears a single second’s scrutiny.

Apply any level of critical thought to what the Queen does, for example, and you immediately turn her into a cheap heritage toy we’d rather pretend she wasn’t. Screw up enough royal tours and it’s barely a second before people start asking how much it costs to fly Harry and Meghan and their Range Rover over to Cape Town for nine days. Tell everyone you’re taking “six weeks off” and people will automatically say: well, when were you last “on”? (Answer: never.) It’s almost as if it’s a relationship that has to go sour regularly in order for all the clauses of the contract to be fulfilled.

In the end, the clever ones simply give up and invent ludicrous light entertainment personas as a distraction, an act of prolonged dishonesty in which they get to make self-promoting documentaries, as long as we can say awful things about those documentaries in return. Admittedly, it’s taken Charles some time to work out quite how facile people’s tastes are, but now here he is playing this cartoonishly humble, unrecognisably twinkly Old Man of Lochnagar, surrounded by women prostrating themselves tearfully or choking out specially penned poems.

It is only at a distance of 30 years he can remind us that he was actually right about, say, organic farming (do you remember how much people attacked him?). Harry may have to wait just as long to get his own hotheaded and unpalatable message across.