REBEL PRINCE: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles
TOM BOWER,
William Collins, 2018
MEGHAN: A Hollywood Princess
ANDREW MORTON,
Michael O’Mara Books, 2018
Review by Phil Shannon
‘Nobody knows
what utter hell it is to be Prince of Wales’, whined Charles, the heir to the
British throne. All that handshaking and
small talk is ‘an intolerable burden’, his never-right office temperature
‘makes my life so unbearable’, first-class seats on commercial airflights are
‘so uncomfortable’. The prince’s self-pitying
outbursts reveal his lack of understanding of the lives of his ‘subjects’ who
would be delighted if their only complaints about life included living in
multiple palaces, owning a fleet of luxury cars, taking skiing holidays to
Aspen, and being allowed to treat taxpaying as purely voluntary on an annual
income of £20 million.
The royalty-obsessive
Tom Bower, in Rebel Prince, takes us
inside the bubble of Charles and the other mediaeval relics. Amongst the tedious palace intrigues,
eyelid-shuttering family squabbles and tiresome protocol ‘controversies’ are
some you-wouldn’t-read-about-it (except that you are) insights into princely
privilege and elitist entitlement.
Take, for
example, Charles’ 146 staff of butlers, cooks, secretaries, chauffeurs, gardeners
(including a dozen retired Indian soldiers to pick snails from his flowerbed by
torchlight) and valets (to run his bath, lay out his daily five clothes
changes, replenish the royal lavatory paper, rake the gravel and plump the cushions).
To these employees,
the petulant autocrat is typically capricious.
Should any luckless royal worker displease him in any way (being two
minutes late with his breakfast eggs, for example, or cutting his sandwiches
into squares rather than triangles) it was goodbye without so much as a
thankyou.
If real work was
a foreign concept to Charles, so was the cost of transport. The tab for the prince’s unlimited access to
private jets, trains and helicopters is picked up by the taxpayer, such as his £18,916
trip on the royal train to visit a pub.
Public transport is a total mystery to Charles - when he once breathlessly
announced that he’d ‘been on the Tube, you know’, a friend’s reply was quick: ‘yes,
but only to open a line’.
The pampered
toff’s extravagance saw Charles’ popularity perpetually in the doldrums, even plunging
to just 4% approval after what was seen, because of his adulterous affair with
Camilla Parker-Bowles, as his betrayal of (Saint) Diana (an active adulterer
herself).
Charles unsuccessfully
attempted to ameliorate his reputation for material indulgence by setting up two
dozen royal-brand charities. He didn’t shake
a tin on a street corner, however, but rather he would hit up rich corporates, celebrities
and foreign royals (entry price £50,000) in return for royal photo-ops (fourth
spot behind the Queen at Ascot, perhaps, or an invite to a royal wedding) for
those hoping some regal fairy dust might settle on them and their brand.
Being green was
another plank in the Charles refurbishment project. The prince opposes genetically-modified crops,
fossil-fuelled global warming, plastic pollution, tropical deforestation and
species extinction (although foxes do not make the cut - they were made for being
torn apart by the hounds of the ‘Tally-Ho’ set). His environmental image was undone, however, by his frequent travel to international
environment events by private jet, trailing massive quantities of CO2
emissions, or by taking a 250 mile helicopter trip straight after exhorting
people to fight climate change by turning off their lights.
As with his
environmentalism (which is more New Age hokum than science-based), even when Charles
gets something right, he does so for the wrong reasons. He opposed the 2003 Iraq War, for example,
not on anti-war or anti-imperialist principle but because of his Arabism (a
creed which also allows him to shill for British military sales to Middle East despotisms).
As a philosopher,
Charles also shows a certain lack of rigour and realism. He adheres to a theory of mystical harmony, based
on the ‘sacred geometry of the body’ (related, somehow, to the Fibonacci number
sequence) and which, if upset, results in a ‘disturbed flow of blood’, for
which he recommends Bach Flower Remedies, coffee enemas, carrot juice and homeopathy.
Alas, for
Charles It is all so different now from the good old pre-industrial,
pre-Enlightenment days, which also had the added bonus of political rule by absolute
monarchy, the days before ‘scientists, planners and socialists upset the old
order’, as he once lamented.
If not through
the pre-modern, scandal-dogged Charles, then perhaps there can be a Markle-led
return of the monarchy to its full, magical glory by adding some Hollywood
sparkle? Andrew Morton, a Royalty
enthusiast and purple-prose specialist, certainly hopes so. In MEGHAN,
he pulls out all stops for the latest ‘Commoner’ bridal acquisition to the
royal household who could “make the monarchy seem more inclusive and relevant
in an ever-changing world”.
Markle is a bi-racial
divorcee, a liberal foe of Trump and Brexit, and a television star whose roles
have seen her snorting cocaine, doing striptease, performing oral sex and generally
displaying flesh. Her Tinsel Town fame and
income was duly balanced, however, by the requisite good works (soup kitchen
volunteer for the homeless) of toiling amongst the needy.
Markle is no
Hollywood airhead – she has a degree in international relations, during which
she became a fan of Noam Chomsky, the left-libertarian, anti-imperialist
intellectual. The feminist child prodigy
(she had written letters of complaint about sexist advertising) went on to
become a United Nations gender-equality advocate.
Markle’s common,
even radical, attire, though, has its fraying edges. She clearly didn’t pack Chomsky’s selected
works for her visit to the troops on her United Service Organisation
entertainment tour of US military bases and Navy destroyers - on the contrary, she
felt ‘very, very blessed’ to support the US war machine.
Markle does not
explain how her television persona, which traded off her looks, helped to
advance the cause of female emancipation, or how, as the voice of World Vision,
a global evangelical Christian charity which refuses to employ same-sex
couples, advances equality.
Nor can Markle
square her love of multi-thousand-dollar dresses and fashion accessories with
her outreach to ordinary people and their rather more down-market sartorial
prospects. True, she does flaunt her ‘ethical
brand’ handbags, ‘conflict-free’ diamonds and ‘cruelty-free’ coats but the
moral gloss wears thin when Markle retires with the Royal women-folk on Boxing
Day whilst the men engage in the jolly Christmas past-time of slaughtering
hundreds of pheasants on the Queen’s estate, including top shooting by Charles
and Diana’s two sons, ‘the killer Wales’, Princes William and Harry of Wales.
The ordinary-titled
Ms Markle is now Her Royal Highness, Duchess of Sussex, Princess, and the once feminist
equality campaigner who bent the knee to no man now gives, and receives, the
curtsy by rank. Markle’s social
ascension is meant to show that economic class is so much old conceptual hat - it
is all about being ‘aspirational’ now. All
you have to do is marry a prince.
The royals are
not, as their PR flaks like to proclaim, ‘Just Like You and Me’. Every Royal Birth, Death and Marriage, every syrupy
episode in The House of Windsor, this
week and every week until the end of time, carries the message that hierarchy
and inequality are inevitable.
In Trotsky’s
choice phrase, however, the ‘dustbin of history’ still has an opening for the
archaic, expensive, undemocratic institution of monarchy with its foul waste of
dividing society into Royals and Commoners, rulers and subjects, upstairs and
downstairs, stars and extras. Time to take
out the rubbish.
