Letters from London (21 page)

Her stage has indeed been big. Apart from anything else, there can be no other member of either House of Parliament who has inspired a piece of South American fiction. Julio Cortázar, in his story “We Love Glenda So Much,” describes a group of film fans who so adore the actress that they are unable to bear the fact that some of her films are less than perfect. These club members therefore buy up copies of her unworthy movies and, with a cut here and a sly addition there, give them a perfection that their incompetent directors had initially been unable to provide. When Glenda announces her retirement, their happiness is complete: her oeuvre is perfect and their love impeccable. Except that one day, a year later, the actress announces her return to the screen. The fans are shattered. They cannot start their work all over again, and so they decide on the ultimate solution: in order to defend both Glenda’s oeuvre and their love for her they must ensure that she doesn’t live to make another film—

If such a group of fans exists, they will surely be pleased with the result on April 9 in Hampstead and Highgate. The work of the death squad in closing off the film career of Glenda Jackson has been done instead by 19, 193 North London voters.

May
1992

7
Traffic Jam at Buckingham Palace

A
couple of years ago, I was driving west out of London, sauntering down the middle lane of the M4 at no more than ten miles an hour over the speed limit, when two search lights lit up my offside wing mirror. They turned, all too rapidly, into police motorcyclists. I was beginning to console myself on the unfairness of my random arrest when they growled past unheeding. They were far too busy sweeping the fast lane for the car they were escorting. It duly appeared in its swift bulk, pounding along at between ninety and a hundred miles an hour: a large black saloon flying a royal pennant on its bonnet. When the rearguard had passed, my companion and I speculated on the limo’s occupant and the reason for such ostentatious speeding. The Queen late for a state lunch? Princess Anne late to feed her horses? The Queen Mum late for a gin and tonic? And so on. But the encounter also made me recall one of Prince Philip’s obiter dicta: he once remarked to an interviewer that the Royal Family would “lose its dignity” if its members were caught in traffic jams like ordinary citizens.

Over the last few years, the Royal Family has shed quite a bit of
its dignity, and the fault has not been that of its motorcycle outriders. The latest revelations, or allegations, or filthy gossip, about the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales may have induced disbelief, rage, pity, and schadenfreude, but they did not come out of a clear blue sky. Most of the recent domestic bulletins about the House of Windsor have been of matrimonial misfortune. There is a probably apocryphal story of a British matron watching Sarah Bernhardt play Cleopatra and commenting, “How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen.” Until not long ago, the remark could be, and was, still applied waggishly to the stodgy, dull, decent, seemingly chaste House of Windsor. Not anymore. For a mother of four children to see one of their marriages break up is probably a statistical normality in present-day Britain; two looks like positive misfortune; three begins to argue that there is something seriously wrong with the family itself. When that woman is the Queen of England, the follow-up questions have a wider resonance.

The fact that Prince Charles himself has been afflicted with marital blight is particularly ironic. The British monarchy, which over the centuries has put its fair share of blackguards, adulterers, and madmen on the throne, and has endured mockery and criticism up to the severest censure of regicide in 1649, has been enjoying for the last half century a remarkably placid and uncontested phase of its existence. One factor in this, even committed monarchists agree, has been genetic good fortune. The line of thinking goes as follows. Jolly lucky we got rid of that unstable and potentially ruinous Edward VIII, plus his foreign, fortune-seeking Mrs. Simpson, and traded him in for the solid stamp-collecting George VI. Jolly lucky that his eldest daughter was the dutiful Elizabeth, and that we got her as Queen rather than the flighty Margaret, who fell in love with a divorced man, liked smoking cigarettes, and hung around with arty types. Jolly lucky, finally, that Charles, an earnest worrier with a proper sense of his ancestry, is going to inherit, rather than the headstrong Anne, the larky Andrew, or the seemingly unmarriageable Edward. And, besides, we don’t just get Charles, we also get Princess Di, the most popular woman in the country. How can the show not run and run?

The main allegations in
Diana: Her True Story
, by Andrew Morton, formerly a
Daily Star
journalist and now a rich man, are: that the marriage of Charles and Di collapsed early and is currently a sham; that Di became acutely depressed and made five “suicide bids” (or, at least, pathetically frenzied cries for help, such as throwing herself against a glass display cabinet and cutting herself with the serrated edge of a lemon slicer), which Charles declined to take seriously; that she suffered from bulimia nervosa for many years of her marriage and was treated by a consultant psychiatrist; that she does not believe she will ever become Queen, an apprehension confirmed by the astrologers she has consulted; that Charles is a cold and unsupportive husband, who throughout his marriage has continued his long-standing “friendship” with Mrs. Camilla Parker-Bowles despite his wife’s protests and jealousy; and that when, after years of painful matrimony, the Princess asked her husband, “But did you ever love me?” he is said to have replied, “No.”

If these disclosures were merely the backstairs chatter of a disgruntled parlor maid, as used to be the case with “royal revelations,” they might have made no more than a deniable early-summer scandal. But Morton was allowed to tape interviews with one of Diana’s sisters and her younger brother; he talked to her former flatmates and Chelsea friends; the publisher of the book was sold eighty previously unseen photos by her father, Earl Spencer; and a slice of profits from the venture will go to a drug-abuse charity of which Diana is patron. In other words, this is as close to
Diana: My Story
as we are likely to get; and if the Princess now finds her life sensationalized and its emphases skewed, then that is the price celebrities often pay for not writing their own stuff.

Morton’s book, as serialized in the
Sunday Times
before publication, was received with fascination, wrath, and a large amount of cant, not least from fellow journalists. The day after the first episode appeared, Donald Trelford, editor of the rival Sunday
Observer
, was quoted as saying of Morton’s book, “It looks like trash to me. I can’t stand stories about Royals who can’t answer back. I don’t know if it’s true or false.” But such sentiments, however worthy, had bowed to
the exigencies of journalism the previous day. The
Sunday Time’s
front page had been dominated by a color photo of a rather melancholy Diana in her finery, beneath the headline
DIANA DRIVEN TO FIVE SUICIDE BIDS BY “UNCARING” CHARLES
. The
Observer’s
was dominated by an even larger color photo, of a grim-looking Princess at the wheel of her car, beneath the headline
DEPRESSION “DROVE DIANA TO FIVE SUICIDE BIDS
.” Devotees of the codes and conventions of British headline writing might have noticed the position of the quotation marks, which separate those parts of the story which are only alleged to be true from those which the newspaper itself endorses: so the
Observer
was confirming the depression but hedging its bets on the suicide bids; whereas the
Sunday Times
was confirming the suicide bids but hedging its bets on whether or not Charles was a heartless husband. The average reader, of course, would come away from each front page with exactly the same impression of what had happened, and probably the same percentage of conviction as to the truth of the story.

But whether the other papers were sniffy-nosed, emulative, or spoiling, none managed, or perhaps tried very hard, to discredit the story in the first few weeks; they were too busy selling newspapers. Nor were there any denials from the Palace. So with the question “Is It True?” on hold, attention turned to “What Does It Portend if True?” and “Should the Bastards Have Been Allowed to Do It?” In constitutional terms, the story portends very little. The couple could separate, they could divorce, Prince Charles could even marry again, and there would be no constitutional crisis. If Henry VIII is anything to go by, he could marry again to his heart’s content; the only disadvantage would be that he couldn’t remarry in church, and therefore couldn’t act as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. So the portents were all more local: to do with the future stability and popularity of the monarchy if its current juve lead withdrew from the production.

This left the question “Should the Bastards Have Been Allowed to Do It?” Though a regulation amount of smarmy humbug oozed from the
Sunday Times
, it was exceeded by the hypocrisy in some of the responses. If the message is bad, shoot the messenger. There were
widespread denunciations of gutter-press intrusiveness, although the story first appeared as a book, from which a broadsheet serialization was made. There were renewed calls for a law of privacy, a subject which thereby climbed higher up the reformists’ agenda than more fundamental matters of government secrecy and freedom of information. There was the reminder that the Royals could sue for libel. (Minor ones, like Lord Linley, Princess Margaret’s son, have already done so.) The Archbishop of Canterbury burbled away in disapproval. So did the Press Complaints Commission, a rather ludicrous body set up by the industry out of the fear that if it didn’t regulate itself the government would come in and do the job less indulgently. The commission condemned what it called “an odious exhibition of journalists dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls in a manner which adds nothing to legitimate public interest in the situation of the heir to the throne.” This stricture was not treated everywhere with proper gravitas, given that two of the commission’s members are the editor of the
News of the World
, historically the market leader in Sunday salacity, and the editor of the
Daily Star
, whose front page that very day had finger-dabbled, with the headline
CAMILLA’S ROYAL OK
, claiming that “Di’s love rival,” Mrs. Parker-Bowles, had won a “big smile” from the Queen at a polo match.

There was even a droll side tiff between Mr. Andrew Neil, editor of the
Sunday Times
, who had fronted the story much more than Mr. Morton himself, and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, former editor of the
Sunday Telegraph
. The two had previously confronted each other in the libel court, when the self-consciously old-style Worsthorne had been obliged to pay the self-consciously new-style Neil a thousand pounds for implying that when Mr. Neil had squired a certain Pamella Bordes around town he knew that she was not just a glamorous model and an ex-House of Commons researcher but also a high-class tart. Sir Peregrine, who despite his parodically English name is of Belgian extraction, and who despite his chivalrous defense of the decencies of life was one of the first people to use the F word on television, returned to the subject of Andrew Neil with gleeful disgust. “Twice last week,” he wrote in his
Sunday Telegraph
column,
“have I had to see Mr. Neil on television. It is not quite a case of ‘see Mr. Neil and die’ but see Mr. Neil and throw up. Has there ever been a more confusing face? With an expression half-bovine and half sheeplike he stares out of the screen in such a way as to leave us all uncertain whether he wants to cut our throats or lick our boots.” It is true that Mr. Neil is not exactly a looker, but connoisseurs of comic physiognomy would do well not to bypass the flamboyant Sir Peregrine: in any Daumier series, he could safely model for the Languid Epicure. As for Miss Pamella Bordes, she is a good example of how the lives of celebrities intertwine. I was in Delhi this February, and seeking conversation with a taxi driver, I remarked that Princess Di happened to be in town, too. (She had visited the Taj Mahal and pronounced it “a very healing experience”—a remark that made no sense at the time but a little more in retrospect.) The driver was indifferent to the Princess’s visit and proclaimed himself much keener on Pamella Bordes, the famous model, who was also visiting Delhi. Our conversation took off when I shyly confessed that I had myself met Miss Bordes, and even shaken her hand. I did not mention that at the time she was in the company—how the names come around again—of Mr. Donald Trelford.