As the Queen’s jubilee year winds to a close;
as the Prince of Wales’ tour ends and this proud nation wipes away a tear,
sniffs, and gropes once more at the trailing apron string; the mind wanders.
Weird associations ...
At
dinner last week; the old guy at the next table asks his friends: “One thing I
can’t understand – how could Charlie leave a beautiful woman like Diana for a
sack of potatoes like Camilla?”
I
never got the Diana thing. Leaving aside Camilla’s comparative assets, or
otherwise, I just didn’t think Diana was all that attractive. I had a fair idea
of what she’d be like, and could imagine the hell of being married to her.
You
see I once knew one of the Spencers – a cousin. He was the image of Earl
Spencer, the brother, who had his moment of fame in 1997. A friendly, generous
guy, he used to ply me with drugs and alcohol hoping I’d get drunk or high
enough to fall into bed with him.
Although he
never overcame my titanic tolerance for intoxicants, it eventually worked on
another young man. When the youth came-to, pantless in a Darling Harbour hotel
room, his first act was to stumble downstairs and call the police. The royal
cousin-in-law found himself charged with false imprisonment and indecent
assault.
As I said:
friendly, generous; and almost completely out of his mind. I’m reliably
informed that he was a fair representation of the rest of the Spencer family,
stretching back generations. So no, I don’t think Di was the innocent, abused
snowflake she and her acolytes would have us believe.
‘But,’ they
say, ‘She was such a wonderful mother. She broke the stuffy royal mould of
parenting at a distance. She was affectionate; took her kids on holiday. Those
boys will be the salvation of the Monarchy.’
Bollocks. As
I write this, the ABC is continuing its tradition of royal documentary
programming: Prince Charles, wading through old home movies. To my inexpert
eye, they seem to be years’ worth of images of happy, affectionate family
frolics; at home, on holiday, and at sea on “working trips”.
So, maybe
after the fun was done a nanny took the kids to be bathed and readied for
dinner; maybe Mum and Dad could at times be remote, or intimidating. In other
words, maybe in some ways they resemble two-thirds of all the other families in
the western world in that era.
Sadly
though, the Dianolytes are right in one respect. In this country, removed from
the institution itself, the Monarchy is reduced to a personality cult. The
advent of the royal grandsons may well keep the monarchist cause alive another
generation.
In Britain,
monarchy serves a purpose. Aside from being a self sustaining tourism campaign,
a long serving monarch provides a valuable source of counsel for British prime-ministers;
an institutional memory.
Here, it’s a
sea-anchor. Not so much in governmental terms, but a mindset: symptomatic of a
cultural cringe; a deep insecurity underlying our pugnacious national
over-compensation.
We still, a
century after federation, live in our mother’s garage. We’re the little man of
the western world.
Isn’t it time we grew up?
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