PRINCE HARRY – FOOL OR KNAVE..?
Well, the immediate aftermath of Prince Harry’s appearance dressed as a member of Hitler’s Wehrmacht has been noisy to say the least. The newspapers – both the pompous & the populist – have swallowed the story whole & editors wearing cat-with-cream smiles have wheeled out their top columnists for trenchant commentary.
And the public haven’t been left out either. Rheumy-eyed veterans of the D-Day landings have been canvassed for their judgements. All three political parties have pronounced solemnly, each equivocating brilliantly via their silver-tongued press officers. And, of course, that new staple of the interactive age, the illiterate email, has been quoted at length too.
In the final analysis, it all seems to add up to something & nothing. Lord Janner, the chairman of the Holocaust Trust feels nothing but disgust. As a Jew who lost most of his family to the Nazis, his anger is entirely understandable. He demands that Harry should ‘come out as a man & apologise, not send a statement’. Good old square-jawed lapsed Royal Fergie thinks that Harry’s getting a raw deal. ‘I want someone to stand up for him & say he is a very good man, & I’m that person’, she whinnies. Prince Charles is, allegedly, furious, motivated more, one suspects, by the fact of yet another Royal laying a turd neatly on the middle of the family doorstep than by any moral sensibilities.
As for Harry himself, my belief is that he selected a Nazi uniform for the exclusive Highgrove Set fancy dress party simply because the poor little sap knew no better. He is, by all accounts, an entirely representative sample of the top drawer type known as ‘nice but dim’. Bred in the most closeted of kennels, Harry knows nothing of that world through which he passes in his dark-windowed Land Rover. No amount of pressing of the flesh on visits to youth centres & building projects could be expected to draw him across the unbridgeable divide that lies between the manicured lawns of Windsor Castle & the scrubby front gardens of the terraced houses just down the road in the grim town of Slough.
There flourishes still a dogged myth that the great cultural schisms of the 1960s ushered in a bright, new Britain in which class barriers were trampled down to be replaced by a cheery, enterprising meritocracy full of flash young Michael Caines & John Lennons. If those barriers were, to some extent, breached so that yesterday’s barrow boy could reasonably aspire to becoming today’s futures market millionaire, it certainly didn’t happen at the expense of 900 years of English aristocracy. Bafflingly, the hunt balls, the race meetings, the country house soirees, the tux & tiara dinners continue to bring out the chinless youths & braying girls, eerily untouched by the passing of time, cut-glass accents intact & anachronistic vocabulary fresh in their mouths.
And nowhere do they flourish more healthily than in the penumbra of the Royal Family, whether striding across the Scottish moors blasting fleeing grouse out of the sky or skiing mob-handed off-piste in Klosters or sipping a Pimms on the hot, white sands of Mustique. The old order prevails, self-sustaining & self-perpetuating, its scions tenderly hand-reared away from the gritty light of the real world, their ignorance of its processes & practices carefully nurtured. Like greyhounds, they are streamlined for the causeways of their own small but perfectly formed environment. But outside it they are hopelessly inept, blinking in the harsh light, faltering & stumbling.
Harry is one such tender bloom. Lacking any kind of weltanschaung to provide him with guidance as to the basic protocols by which most of live, he faltered & stumbled. Pulling on that familiar uniform & slipping the swastika armband up his sleeve, he really didn’t have a clue that in a harsher world they represented something quintessentially & enduringly evil. Yes, he should have made a personal public apology, even if it would have had to be drafted for him by the press office. And now, ostensibly as a demonstration of good faith, but actually in order to begin an authentic education in the ways of the world in which the rest of us live, he should accompany his grandmother when she goes later this month to meet Holocaust survivors in commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz 60 years ago. Maybe it’s not too late to broaden the small, dim mind of this callow, foolish, pampered prince.
11:37:35 PM 
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