Britain's popular press has long had a fixation with the royal family. The fact is that stories about the royals generate newspaper sales like practically nothing else. Nor is public fascination with them by any means confined to Britain. To the world-at-large, the House of Windsor is a fantastic real life soap opera, a source of endless entertainment.
Seldom has a royal story left the public quite so agog as the collapse of the trial of the sometime butler of the late Princess Diana, Paul Burrell. Charged with having misappropriated items galore belonging to the princess, Burrell was facing the possibility of a prison sentence when the queen suddenly and belatedly indicated that, following the princess’s death, she had had a conversation with the butler in which he had declared his intention of looking after the aforementioned items. On learning this, the prosecution instantly abandoned the case. Exulting that the “lady had come through” for him, Burrell found himself acquitted. Amid much tumult and much fevered debate about the significance of it all, he left court a free and hugely relieved man.
Many were exercised about the constitutional niceties of the queen’s intervention. For given that British justice is dispensed in the queen’s name, could she have been summoned to appear in her own court? Moreover, how would things stand if, say, under her own law, Britain’s monarch were accused of perjury? At the same time, speculation raged as to why the queen had not spoken up for Burrell before the trial began.
Some were tempted to believe that she and her entourage became worried about what Burrell might divulge were his trial to continue. It must be said that if this was indeed an attempt by the queen to stop the butler’s mouth, it could hardly have been less successful.
For Burrell wasted no time in selling his story to the Daily Mirror (thereby incurring the virulent contempt of other newspapers which had previously been eager to ingratiate themselves with him). He also agreed to be interviewed by the veteran British broadcaster, Trevor Macdonald, on prime time television. Personable, plausibly decent and highly articulate, the butler proved himself to be a television natural. His performance was riveting. Among other things, he recalled how he had been in the habit of smuggling Princess Diana’s lovers into Kensington Palace in the boot of his car; reported that the queen had told him to beware of “dark powers” that were at work in Britain; and revealed the existence of a locked box that contained a tape on which the princess recorded the allegation of a former footman of Prince Charles that he had been raped by a senior member of the prince’s staff.
The grisly allegation on the tape (which, perhaps needless to say, has disappeared) has since been repeated by the putative rape victim himself, and is certainly the most damaging disclosure about the royal family to have emerged in the wake of Paul Burrell’s aborted trial. It is, however, far from being the only embarrassment that now confronts the royals in general and Prince Charles in particular.
Aside from receiving fresh insights into Prince Charles’ own extravagant idiosyncrasies (every morning the prince gets a valet to squeeze toothpaste onto his toothbrush and often changes his clothes five times a day), the public has learned that members of the royal household have been in the habit of supplementing their incomes by selling off expensive presents that have been given to their employers; they have also, it seems, been given to browbeating stores which enjoy the royal charter into selling goods to them at discount prices.
Only too aware of public disquiet about all this, Prince Charles has been obliged to launch an enquiry into what has been going on. But this prospective investigation, a purely internal one conducted by his own private secretary, is unlikely to be taken very seriously; it may simply not be enough to assuage mounting national concern that there is much that is rotten, as well as just plain ridiculous, in the House of Windsor. How extraordinary it has begun to seem that the royal family used to be regarded as the “dignified” element in Britain’s unwritten constitution. For dignity is a quality less and less associated with a family that is in danger of becoming a byword for low farce, or worse.
Earlier this year, following the much-mourned death of the queen mother and the queen’s hugely popular Golden Jubilee celebrating her 50 years on the throne, the royal family seemed to have recovered its status as a much-loved national institution. Now, however, they are in the midst of a public relations debacle possibly more ominous than any they have yet known. Republicans convinced that Britain badly needs an elected head of state and a written constitution are gloating over their discomfiture. Still, without the royal family, where would the British media and the British people be? The mordant American biographer of the royals, Kitty Kelly, believes that the removal of the monarchy would leave a “gaping hole” in the British psyche.
If the House of Windsor ceased to exist, Britain’s tabloid press might have no choice but to re-invent it.
• Neil Berry, a London-based freelance journalist since 1980, is the author of “Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism”.
