Letters from London (24 page)

The solicitors’ bill for this work—an unopposed eviction case, some phone answering, plus a bit of watch-your-step to Fleet Street—came to a staggering £23,114.64, the equivalent of 257 hours of
“stress therapy” from Miss Dale, or approximately 5,800 bottles of J. P. Bartier claret. Not a penny of this was coughed up by Mr. Lamont himself Most of the bill was paid by a generous but unnamed Conservative Party supporter, while £4,700 came from Treasury funds. The justification for this latter contribution, which for a year and a half was successfully concealed from the public, ran as follows: if ministers are involved in legal actions relating to official duties, they may, under a Cabinet Office code of guidance, be indemnified with taxpayers’ money. Apparently, the then Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Peter Middleton, told Mr. Lamont that it was “reasonable and proper” for the Treasury to meet a portion of the bill: the £4,700 thus paid was for Mr. Carter-Ruck’s firm to issue a statement about potential libel and handle subsequent press inquiries (at £200 per hour, in case you are planning to use them). There seem to be three problem areas in all this. First, whether “legal action” can be stretched to include “preemptive legal strikes against possible libels;” second, whether Mr. Lamont should have chosen a famously expensive firm when some of his bill was being footed by the public; and, third, whether his case fell remotely within the Cabinet Office guidelines. It’s true that if he had not been appointed Chancellor he wouldn’t have been able to rent out his own house and therefore wouldn’t have been obliged to evict the stress therapist, but it’s hard to see how this domestic irritation could be said to have anything in the world to do with his official duties.

Mr. Lamont is currently being described as “accident-prone”—political shorthand for “incompetent beyond the dreams of the Opposition”—and is sternly announcing that he will not resign (often a prelude to resignation). But his predicament is far from unique. Consider its elements: unfortunate image, doubtful competence, public unpopularity, plus a willingness to let others pay your bills. Who else fits this profile perfectly? The British Royal Family, of course. And in the very week that Mr. Lamont was desperately defending his reputation and his job, the Queen was defending hers, too. In a speech at the Guildhall to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of her accession to the throne, she made a rare public appeal for sympathy, and
even acknowledged that there was room for debate over the nature of the organization she heads. “There can be no doubt, of course, that criticism is good for people and institutions that are part of public life,” she said. “No institution—City, monarchy, whatever—should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don’t. But we are all part of the same fabric of our national society and that scrutiny, by one part of another, can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness, good humor and understanding.” This may seem bland and banal to a reader living in a republic, but in a British context it was positively self-lacerating.

Her Majesty admitted that 1992 had been for her an
“annus horribilis.
The sexual and marital tomfoolery among her whelps was indeed terrible PR for Windsor Inc. And the year closed with bad news feeding off bad, so that even a potentially blithe event was thrown out of kilter by the murk surrounding it. This was the case with Princess Anne’s remarriage on a raw and snow—threatening Scottish afternoon. It could have been a mildly upbeat affair, contributing a speck of much-needed image modernization to the family: here, after all, was a divorced woman in her forties marrying a chap five years her junior, and also introducing a few welcome (if dilute) Jewish molecules into the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha blood royal. Instead, the union was swamped by the backwash from Charles and Diana’s separation, and the fact that the event took place in Scotland merely pointed up the current impossibility of royal remarriage within the Church of England. What was billed necessarily as a “quiet family affair” smacked instead of a dynasty hunkering and bunkering down against misfortune. The rare dispatch with which Anne married Comdr. Tim Laurence even depressed the normally buoyant memorabilia market. Previous royal hitchings produced hundreds of commercial supplicants to Buckingham Palace, asking permission to vend jaunty mugs and smile-filled T-shirts. By the time Anne and Tim had signed the register, however, only a single such request had filtered in to the Palace. One manufacturer from Stoke-on-Trent commented glumly, “We didn’t think anyone would want to buy Anne and Tim tea towels.”

Whether there will be Royal Worcester oil-and-vinegar cruets to mark Charles and Di’s official separation remains to be seen. This public acknowledgment of a widely reported reality was no doubt designed as some kind of solution; but at best it is a holding operation, and one which opens up more possibilities than it closes down. (Separate lives, separate courts, separate lovers? A tabloid editor’s dream.) Worse, it refocused the same problems as in the Lamont case: the tie-in between the private and the public life. If you don’t view the Royal Family as the privileged descendants of a bunch of brigands and main chancers airbrushed into respectability by high-quality PR (with even Shakespeare & Co. engaged on the account), then you tend to invoke symbolic identity, public service, duty, and so forth. During various official junkets (the Coronation, the Investiture of the Prince of Wales), various Royals pronounce various vows whose texts are rarely scoured. But roughly they say: we promise to do our duty as symbolic top people, figure heads of the nation, defenders of the established church, and in return you give us your fealty, some of your money, and applause ad libitum. This larger pledge for the most part wafts mistily in the air, while groundlings pay closer attention to the lesser pledges: for instance, the marriage vows, promises to forsake all others and so on, made before a television audience and a priest of the said established church. So what happens when the marital log of Elizabeth H’s children shows a 100 percent failure rate? Do we merely blame the press? Do we look with a darker, different eye upon the parents? Or do we say that this is the royal equivalent of Mr. Lamont’s infraction, and that the family is recklessly running over the credit limit of its moral Access card?

And the fact that “we” are talking about it in this newly authoritative way indicates that another shift has taken place. As at the time of the 1936 Abdication, there is now talk of a constitutional crisis. There isn’t one, inasmuch as there is very little constitution to refer to; rather, there are the adipose opinions of a group of political and spiritual power brokers who take it upon themselves to be moral arbiters. When Edward VIII—like Charles, a late marrier—was forced out, the viziers involved were the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, and the editor of
Vie Times
. The historian A. J. P. Taylor described these three “directors of public life” as talking subsequently “as though they had triumphed over the laxity inherited from the nineteen-twenties.”

Currently, the main pseudoconstitutional questions being asked are: Can Diana be crowned Queen if she and Charles are living apart; and shouldn’t Charles give up the throne in favor of his elder son, William? The directors of public life have in the meantime changed. Rupert Murdoch’s
Times
is much less influential, the Prime Minister is an easygoing loyalist, and the Archbishop of Canterbury is a member of the happy-clappy persuasion. With the Palace having lost the knack of setting the agenda itself, a loose crew of tabloid editors, opinion pollsters, and royal experts has taken over. So Charles is being and will continue to be tried in some informal court of morals and popularity. No matter that he is the legitimate heir to the throne, that he is still of sound mind, and that he has been trained all his life to assume the function of monarch. How will this stack up against the fact that he two-timed the most popular woman in Britain?

And then, on top of all this domestic drama, there is the question of money. This arose with a vengeful suddenness in the wake of the Windsor Castle fire. Normally, a good blaze plays in a predictable fashion, producing a sort of subdued Reichstag effect. (One could even imagine a junior Royal torching the castle to reattract public sympathy.) But this time the opposite occurred. Peter Brooke, Secretary of State for National Heritage, no doubt imagined he was being a loyal minister and an uncontroversial citizen when he announced the next day in the House of Commons that the state would pick up the estimated £60 million tab for restoring “this most precious and well-loved part of our national heritage.” Buckingham Palace confirmed that the Queen herself would pay only for the repair of damaged artifacts from her private collection—which seemed to come in at a few carpets and chandeliers, plus various items dented by the firemen. Both sides agreed that the financial position was clear. Windsor Castle belonged not to the Queen as a private individual but to the
Crown; therefore, the Crown, meaning the state, meaning the taxpayer, would have to fork out.

However, the taxpayer was not very impressed by what was being done in his or her name. It’s true that £60 million, spread over a number of years, is nothing in terms of the national budget—about the equivalent of a couple of bottles of dirty claret from a Paddington “off-license.” But the taxpayer has had many years now of being told by a Conservative government that public services must slim down, be efficient, give value for money—political cant constantly wheeled out to justify closing down hospitals, schools, libraries, and so on. Why should this principle and these phrases not apply equally to the public services provided by the Royal Family?

Of course, it’s often difficult to assess what “the public” thinks. In royal matters, “public attitudes” seem to be assembled from ad hoc opinion polls plus the shifting editorial viewpoints of normally monarchist newspapers. In a February 1991 poll, nearly eight out of ten people interviewed thought the Queen should pay tax; more recently,
The Sun
found that 59,553 of its readers believed that the Queen should fund the repairs to Windsor Castle, while only 3,843 believed that the state should do so. No one, it must be emphasized, took to the streets on this matter; no pikes were waved with blades greased for inserting in severed Windsor heads. But the monarchy’s advisers can tell what is just a straw in the wind and what looks more like a whole damn haystack. So it was not exactly a coincidence that two days after the Queen’s unprecedented appeal for sympathy the Prime Minister announced that she and the Prince of Wales had agreed to pay tax on their private incomes, and that five lesser Royals—Princess Anne, Princes Andrew and Edward, Princess Margaret, and Princess Alice—would in future be paid out of the Queen’s pocket, thus sparing the Civil List £900,000 per annum. Mr. Major indicated that the Queen herself had initiated discussions on this matter back in the summer, long before the smoke rose at Windsor.
The Sun
congratulated its readers with the voluptuously smug headline
YOU SPOKE—SHE LISTENED
and acclaimed the victory of “People Power.”

It was a tiny triumph, a successful protest squeak after decades of
barnacled deference. A nation that three and a half centuries ago didn’t shrink from executing Charles I has for too long winced at the idea of examining the sovereign’s check stubs: the Queen’s untaxability has been seen as somehow part of her separateness, her magnificence, her magic. Royal cash is best discussed both in hugger-mugger and on bended knee. The last time the Windsor stipend was renegotiated—in 1990, when Mrs. Thatcher was Prime Minister and Mr. Major her Chancellor of the Exchequer—a ten-year index-linked, inflation-proof deal was signed, with a special promise from the government that no new accounts of how the Queen spent her money would be published before the year 2000.

Most people waking up to the Queen’s nod of fiscal submission probably believed that exposing Elizabeth to the lads from the Inland Revenue was a major constitutional breakthrough. But when income tax was first introduced on a permanent basis in 1842, the then Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, persuaded Queen Victoria to pay this new levy on all her income, from whatever source. She did so until her death in 1901, since when the principal narrative line has been of the monarchy trying with increasing success to be let off as much tax as possible. Edward VII made the first move on his accession, but was fobbed off by a government fighting a money-intensive Boer War at the time. However, George V managed to get the Civil List exempted from tax, and George VI, in a series of agreements concealed from Parliamentary scrutiny, had his private income declared untouchable as well. This has been the position for the past fifty-six years.

Income tax was trifling throughout the nineteenth century, so Queen Victoria could well afford to pay it. Serious increases began only in 1906, when Lloyd George introduced his first budget and sought money to lay the foundations of the welfare state. What has happened since then is that the tax burden has been greatly increased—rising to 97.5 percent between 1941 and 1953, and reaching 98.0 percent between 1975 and 1979—while the Royal Family has progressively argued itself out of contributing to the state over which it has presided. Part of the current sovereign’s private wealth arises directly from this exemption. If
£1
were invested in averagely producing
shares in 1936 (the last year the monarch paid tax), an investor who had paid tax at the top rate down the years would today find his or her stake worth £42, whereas a nontaxpaying king or queen would find the same portfolio worth £418. To put it another way: the lowest estimate of the Queen’s private wealth is £50 million, a sum that could have been generated had her father, George VI, invested a mere £119,000 in a spread of British shares back in 1936.

Queen to Pay Tax! Triumph of People Power! Yes, up to a point. But how much she will pay, and on what, is an altogether different matter, not to be decided by newspaper phone-ins. Discussions will now proceed in extreme secrecy as to what exactly belongs to the Queen (Balmoral, Sandringham, her racing stables) and what belongs to the state and is merely used by the Queen (Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, the royal yacht). Then there is a third category of items, like the Crown Jewels, the Royal Art Collection, and even the Royal Stamp Collection, which are generally deemed inalienable, vested in the sovereign rather than the individual, and therefore not taxable. And after the division of the spoils has been made, there will presumably be meaty arguments about the Queen’s professional allowances. What will the Revenue permit her? How many frocks and shoes are deemed essential for the job? She will, of course, be able to claim a personal exemption of £3,445, and if she can successfully argue that her husband does not work, she will benefit from an additional allowance of £1,720.