POLITICS
Where are the lieutenant-commanders of yesteryear?
FERDI NAND MOUNT
What went wrong was bound to happen sooner or later, as the needs of a populist monarchy — to impress the image of a warm, caring and socially responsible wife and mother — came into conflict with the strict dictates of a constitutional monarchy. How should Mr Shea answer the question: 'Does the Queen care about unemploy- ment?' Can he afford to refuse to answer? But if he says, 'of course, she is very concerned', there then arises a fatal temp- tation — which Mr Andrew Neil says Mr Shea failed to resist — to answer other questions in the same mollifying tone. On the miners' strike? Well, there too perhaps the Queen ought to let her concern for her subjects' welfare be known. But on the American raid on Libya? Now that surely is a case to keep one's trap shut.
Clearly the Sunday Times did not keep to the rules of the game. Mr Shea's answers were grotesquely played up and dressed up into a front-page story, and lent factitious weight by disguising Mr Shea as 'sources close to the Queen' thus implying sources more elevated, more numerous and more unusual than a workaday press officer. But this characteristic Sunday Times behaviour is not quite enough to explain the whole peculiar business.
Mr Shea himself admits that 'I have no direct knowledge of the Queen's views on Mrs Thatcher'. Sir William puts it more forcefully: 'It is equally preposterous to suggest that any member of the Queen's Household, even supposing that he or she knew what her Majesty's opinions on government policy might be (and the Press Secretary certainly does not), would reveal them to the Press.'
Yet at the same time he maintains that it is the Press Secretary's business to 'corn- ment on propositions put to them by journalists' and that there was nothing in the conversations between Mr Shea and Mr Simon Freeman of the Sunday Times which could 'reasonably bear the inter- pretation put upon it by the writers of the article on the front page'.
What is the explanation of these seemingly somewhat contradictory state- ments? How can a Press Secretary wholly ignorant of the Queen's views (except, say, on the welfare of corgis) make any useful comment upon the sort of propositions liable to be put to him? What exactly is he there for, beyond dealing with the minu- tiae of royal tours?
The answer, I think, is that his state- ments and comments are, in a curious, undefined sense, intended to be formal and without substance, and therefore unlike politicians' hints and leaks, not really to be interpreted as having much ulterior mean- ing. When the Queen sends a message to Ruritania expressing shock and sympathy on the death of President Rudolph, we are not to read into it any political leaning towards the old brute or the disgusting policies of his government.
Under the new populist dispensation, when the Queen's expressions of sympathy and concern radiate into areas of domestic controversy, such as the miners' strike, they are intended not to lend covert aid to Mr Scargill but to convey a similar content- free niceness. From here it is but a short, though slippery, step to Mr Shea finding himself driven to claim that the Queen is 'very much to the Left on social issues', in order to deny effectively that she is a crusty old reactionary. As soon as the Queen is given a public personality at all, it has to be one of glorious synthesis, capable of sym- pathy not only with every race and creed but with every political colour.
We reach then a splendid absurdity, a height of artificiality quite as bizarre as anything dreamed up to boost le roi soleil. Only a newspaper as crass as the Sunday 'Scuttle diplomacy.' Times could have failed to understand that they were not really being told anything very interesting, or indeed intended to attach much importance to it. Mr Andrew Neil is like a character from the provinces in a Moliere comedy, making a fearful hash of the rigmarole of Court.
As to the more amusing if constitutional- ly irrelevant question of what the Queen actually does think about these questions, I have an open, not to say blank mind. Is she a crypto-pink, having imbibed dangerous doses of Uncle Dickie at an impressionable age? Or is she an upper-class consensualist, a sort of upgraded Sir Ian Gilmour, or, on the contrary, quite a tough nut of the old school and not displeased to see her subjects smartened up a little? The third possibility makes a duller story, since it is more what you might expect. Perhaps she is indeed a mixture of all three, blended over 34 years of having to listen with polite sympathy and apparent suspension of dis- belief to a succession of prime ministers pushing their assorted wares at her every Tuesday evening.
Pace Mr St John-Stevas, this sort of experience is not necessarily the best way to acquire profound political wisdom, any more than, say, being a permanent mem- ber of the studio audience for Question Time. But such longevity on the throne is bound to engender a more than usually acute sense of self-preservation. The superficial attractions of sovereigns who wear their hearts on their sleeves — 'something must be done' — quickly turn sour. And it was, I suspect, for this reason that Sir William wrote so sharply to the Thies — not, as the more idiotic Tory backbenchers surmised, in order to present an olive branch to beleaguered Mrs Thatcher and the Government, but to protect the reputation of the monarchy which was beginning to look very slightly crumbly, even in the afterglow of the royal wedding.
All the same, there is something a little stale and rechauffe about the business. Most of the allegations have long passed their sell-by date. I felt a lack of inventive oomph in the Sunday Times presentation, and a slight longing for the French news- papers of old. Where is the news of Prince Philip's go-go dancer, of Prince Charles's imminent reception into the Roman Catholic church, of the Duke of Kent's affair with Martina Navratilova?
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