Royal Cock-up

The movie Margaret Rose, presently being filmed in Britain, will show the late Princess Margaret, the Queen’s sister, banging her head against a headboard whilst getting shagged by her lover, Tony Armstrong-Jones. It doesn’t matter that the scenes are drawn from life—such a film would have been inconceivable before Diana’s death. The same screenplay has Prince Philip boasting about his sexual conquests with a string of women other than his wife—again, an open secret not previously referred to in the media.

The royal family’s financial ledgers have also been opened for the first time by the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, subjecting Charles and Camilla to the indignity of having her cost to the public purse exposed and debated. As it turns out, she was parsimonious next to Charles’s own ever-expanding retinue of more than eighty-five staff, including a footman whose tasks included squeezing toothpaste onto the princely toothbrush.

Until recently, the two princes royal, William and Harry, were spared such public scrutiny by a gentleman’s agreement with the Press Complaints Commission. This agreement prevented the media from reporting on their activities for the duration of their full-time education. The agreement continues to cover Prince William, who remains a full-time student at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland until June, when he will join his younger brother for officer training at the Sandhurst military academy. (Harry got into Sandhurst despite having insufficient grades.) But the gloves came off for Prince Harry once he graduated from Eton, and the resulting publicity glare has not been altogether good.

The younger prince was revealed to be a hard-drinking roustabout, prone to smoking marijuana and slugging paparazzi photographers outside nightclubs at 3 a.m., who showed up at a fancy-dress party wearing a Nazi armband on a German Afrika Corps uniform. His girlfriend, the Zimbabwean-born beauty Chelsy “Ravy” Davy, is cut from the same cloth, having been photographed smoking pot at a boozy beach party. Prince Charles has attempted to steer both sons toward a “better” circle of friends to no avail—the upper classes of British society have not been this decadent since the 1920s. Prince William was persuaded to befriend Camilla’s son, Tom Parker Bowles, shortly before the latter was implicated in a cocaine scandal and narrowly avoided facing charges. (He has since rehabilitated himself as a respectable food writer.) Harry embarrassed himself with the Nazi armband at the birthday party of Harry Meade, another of the Highgrove set and one of six pro-fox-hunt campaigners who interrupted Tony Blair’s speech to a Labour party conference.

It is known that both brothers share an animosity toward the press and toward Camilla in about equal measure, although it is said William blames the press directly for his mother’s death, while Harry tends to blame Camilla. While she was alive, Diana did not hide her hatred of Camilla and tabloid editor Piers Morgan recalls in a recent memoir that a young Prince William tried to cheer up his mother with a joke concerning the difference between Camilla and a horse—the joke being that there wasn’t any.

That both sons set aside their dislike of their new stepmother and agreed to attend the wedding is testament to the close relationship they have with their father and their desire for his happiness. Charles has, by every account, found greater contentment with the earthy Camilla than he ever did with the flighty Diana. And personal happiness, after all, is what the modern middle-aged royal ought to seek, pour encourager les autres.

Camilla did not get the fairy-tale castle wedding she wanted, but on the other hand even Princess Anne will be required to curtsy to her as the wife of the heir to the throne. There were to be no presents and no cameras allowed at the wedding in order to keep it “low-key”—no reason was offered for keeping it “low-key” other than the one which sprang to mind, “an embarrassment”—but on the other hand, the couple will adorn a postage stamp and they were granted permission to take the royal train on their honeymoon.

Above all, Charles has finally been able to stand up to the dominating figure of his mother and the forbidding figure of his father, and strike a blow for personal fulfillment. What does the Queen know, after all, about the obligations of taking the throne?