In the ideal world of Buckingham Palace public relations, the most prominent headline about the royal family last week might have been a hurrah for the shortlist of the Queen’s platinum jubilee pudding competition, organised by Fortnum & Mason and judged by Mary Berry. However, try as the Palace might to make this a celebratory summer of bunting and “God bless you ma’am”, the monarch’s offspring keep on trashing the party plans. No sooner, it seems, has a table been prepared for a royal tea than an inspector calls.
It is said that the secret to great longevity is never to stop having novel experiences. Whatever the truth of that idea, one experience that the Queen might have preferred to avoid is the necessity, in her 95th year, of bailing out her 62-year-old child with reportedly up to £12m so that he could avoid appearing in an American court to defend himself against allegations of coerced sex with a trafficked 17-year-old. Andrew, of course, maintains his innocence and in settling the case with his accuser, Virginia Giuffre, accepts none of her accusations. We might have to wait for long distant episodes of The Crown properly to imagine how the conversations went that led to those funds being released, but it is to be hoped that the Queen’s second son did not offer his mother versions of his “incapable of sweating” and Pizza Express excuses. One result of those chats was that Andrew was stripped of his military titles. The city of York is now looking for ways to cut ties with its disgraced duke.
Following hard on that shameful legal episode came the revelation that the heir to the throne may be questioned by the Metropolitan police in connection with alleged criminal corruption at one of his charitable foundations. Pending the inquiry, there is no reason not to cleave to the outraged faith of Prince Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby that his friend had no knowledge of those dealings: “If there has been some scam, some breaking of the law, you honestly think that he would have been party to that? It beggars belief!”
The police will concentrate on the letter from the prince’s close aide Michael Fawcett, which allegedly offered to help Saudi tycoon Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz upgrade his honorary CBE to a knighthood – and to support his application for British citizenship – in exchange for generous donations to Charles’s charitable efforts to restore £45m Dumfries House in Ayrshire. Fawcett has resigned and Clarence House repeated its statement that “the Prince of Wales had no knowledge of the alleged offer of honours or British citizenship on the basis of donation to his charities”.
Still, as details have emerged of the visitors’ book of donors who lined up for candlelit dinners with the heir to the British throne in support of that project, one question is hard to avoid: what, you wonder, did Prince Charles imagine was in it for them? It’s only a surprise that the News of the World’s fake sheikh never discussed funding the panelling of a Georgian dining room or pored over plans for Knockroon, the “Scottish Poundbury”.
In her long reign the Queen, aided by a tight grip on privy purse millions, has avoided even the most distant whiff of venality. She has made the wearing of a crown containing some of the world’s largest diamonds seem like a heavy cross she is prepared to bear. Though she and her late husband may have moved between gilded palaces, they convincingly did so with Thermos flasks and Tupperware. The idea that such a sense of rectitude can be reliably passed on between generations is, as Thomas Paine long ago observed, an idea “as absurd as an hereditary mathematician; as ridiculous as an hereditary poet laureate”.
Whether, as might seem preferable but unlikely, the Queen decides that 70 years on the throne is long enough for anyone, and effects a smooth handover this summer, or whether she soldiers on towards her self-addressed centenary telegram, the events of last week are another reminder that it is not going to be an easy transition. When crises come, as crises surely will, Charles III will not be able to draw on the deep reserves of affection that the Queen has always enjoyed.
Assuming the expected succession, the future king will inherit the problem of his brother, which may recede along with Andrew himself into the Palace shadows, and the problem of his younger son, which will not. The other snippet of news last week that can hardly have brought jubilee cheer to Clarence House was the announcement that Prince Harry’s “frank memoir” will be published before the end of the year. As his father will know, publishers don’t pay $15m for a book without some guarantee of explosive candour.
For most of her reign, and certainly in the last 40 years, the steadfastness of the Queen has held together the rickety and anachronistic institution itself. Charles, for all his good intentions, shows negligible evidence of perhaps the most remarkable of his mother’s qualities, her apparent self-contained indifference to how she is viewed. Is there public appetite for an emotionally needy monarch? Time will tell. Most likely, the succession will demonstrate the abiding truth baked into the hereditary principle, just as surely Mary Berry’s currants are baked into her fruit cakes. The institution may have struck lucky in the integrity and grace of the three score and ten of the present incumbent’s reign. But luck is all it ever can be.
