ANOTHER VOICE

EuroDisney's failure prompts fresh thoughts on the survival of the monarchy

AUBERON WAUGH

The Sun's story that the Princess of Wales is claiming a £10 million settlement on separation from the Prince may not con- cern us much except that the Sun is usually right in its stories about the Princess; and there is one aspect to the matter which deserves closer attention. I cannot imagine why the Sun's stories about the Princess of Wales generally seem to get the basic facts right, while its stories about the Queen and other members of the royal family are often spectacularly absurd, either invented or manifestly down-grade gossip. But the interesting thing about the Princess's £10 million claim was the revelation that the pay-out would cover, among other staff, the wages of four policemen who cost 'around £5,700 a week'.

This strikes me as probably being a gen- uine leak, because nobody would invent such a figure without some attempt to justi- fy it, and it is quite possible that Sun reporters were too thick to spot its import — that the four policemen guarding this young woman cost £1,425 a week or £74,100 a year each. Even if the total figure of £296,400 includes the cost of running two police cars, it still seems to me that these four policemen are on to a good thing.

Discussing Sir Pat Sheehy's proposed reforms of the police, one of the more pachydermous chief constables objected that his proposal to abolish, or at any rate severely restrict, police overtime would endanger our beloved royal family by throwing the whole royal protection system out of kilter. Clearly royal protection relies on police overtime. Clearly it is another police racket or 'scam' which the Associa- tion of Senior Police Officers is now rush- ing to protect.

Pat Sheehy was jeered and interrupted by shouts of 'shame' when he told the nation's chief constables at their conference in Birmingham that in his opinion the public should not have to pay more than it needed to recruit new officers. It was at that point that he admitted he did not understand why chief police officers had not brought about reform themselves. This seems to be the nub of the problem.

When I discovered and started writing about the great police cell robbery, where- by police stations can charge the Home Office as much as £500 a night to keep a prisoner in a cell, I assumed this was an abuse which had crept in somewhere along the line, and would soon be stopped. On

the contrary, I learn that this flagrant scam is endorsed up to the highest level. One may point to occasional absurdities, like the £2,008 once charged to keep one man in a cell at Brecon overnight, or the £561 it reg- ularly costs in Hertfordshire, but the nationwide average of £234 a night is quite a bit more expensive than a single room in the Ritz or the Savoy, and would seem to suggest that so far as the maintenance of law and order in this country is concerned we are in the hands of mobsters.

The amazing thing is how little anybody seems to care. We allow armed police to set up roadblocks around the City of London and search the ash-trays of private cars for evidence of drug abuse. It is almost as if we enjoy being terrorised by these mobsters. Perhaps the country is interested in noth- ing, really, except the royal family, with whatever degree of adulation or rancorous loathing it chooses. When a handful of over-excited feminists climbed over the gar- den wall at Buckingham Palace last week, it was to be expected that the Sun would lead Wednesday's newspaper with the news (`The Peasants are Revolting, Ma'am: Queen's Fury as Mob go over Palace Wall'). Nobody asked why it was necessary to send 45 armed policemen and a police helicopter, in addition to the palace guard, or how much it cost. Next day, the paper's star columnist, Richard Littlejohn, was still brooding about the matter:

The Dykes for Peace who invaded Bucking- ham Palace .. . can consider themselves lucky to be alive. Apparently the military are allowed to defend the Royal Palaces with armed force. The Grenadier and Coldstream Guards would have been entirely within their rights to shoot on sight . . . It would have been more effective — and much more fun — to have fixed bayonets and given them a taste of cold steel. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that these are not the kind of women who like it up 'em.

There is insufficient space to discuss the complicated psychopathology of the New British male in relation to his monarch, but one observes that Littlejohn here appears in the role of staunch defender. 'The harri- dans were eventually rounded up by sniffer dogs,' he revealed. 'That can't have taken long.'

Yet on Tuesday of last week the Sun led its news with a vicious attack on the cost of the Royal Yacht Britannia. '200,000 jobs to go but £12m-a-year royal Britannia is sail-

ing on . . ."YACHT A CHEEK!' the news- paper commented wittily in its main head- lines. Then on Wednesday we had the break-in at Buckingham Palace, on Thurs- day: 'Di Wants £10 million . .

Some time ago, writing on the survival of the monarchy, I suggested it would be sad if the monarchy survived only as a focus for the nation's sadism. As Littlejohn demon- strates, New Brit sadism can be harnessed as easily against the Queen's enemies — on this occasion, the anti-nuclear feminists as it can be used to torment the royal fami- ly. Guarded by a crooked police force, and sadistically mocked by the nation's embit- tered social cripples, the monarchy can happily continue to occupy its slightly goth- ic corner of the national scene if it sets its mind to the task.

However, an alternative future for the monarchy is suggested by the new Queen Elizabeth Gates at Hyde Park Corner. They do not belong in Hyde Park, of course, but in some kiddies' playground or theme park in the north of England. They belong, firmly and unmistakably, to the classless culture of mass entertainment the American culture, if you like — which Murdoch, according to William Shawcross, has made it his life's purpose to spread all over the world. The royal family could easi- ly find a place in Murdoch's new Disney- world culture, even a high-profile place, along the lines of Visiting Celebrity with a Heart of Gold, or Fairy Queen, Fairy Princess and satirical Prince Charming.

It might be said that the Princess of Wales has already found .,erself such a place. However, some will agree with me that since the collapse of socialism this mass entertainment culture is the chief enemy of human intelligence and dignity, let alone civilisation, in the modern world. Our main concern must be to sabotage it wherever possible. In this context, the best news since the breaching of the Berlin wall is that EuroDisney has proved such a spec- tacular flop. There is still a little fight left in the humane bourgeois cultures of Europe. Let us send the Queen Elizabeth Gates to Blackpool, like the Festival of Britain's Skylon, and the Princess of Wales to Marne-la-Vallee, near Paris, where she can dress up as Korky the Kat and be photographed to her heart's content until the whole rickety structure collapses about her.