Rotten to be royal?

Press, 20 December 1978, Page 17

Rotten to be royal?

Home & People

Do you realise that the boy wonder, our up-and-coming Prince Charles is 30? It’s appalling. It’s like Elizabeth Taylor growing old and fat. It’s like your first baby’s voice breaking.

It’s as bad as if Shirley Temple suddenly grew up and became an ambassadress. Shirley Temple did become an ambassadress. There you are, you sec. Dreadful. Thirty is when you have to stop being Promising. Thirty is when you hear

people denouncing the young these days and realise they aren’t talking about you (it’s often Prince Charles doing the denouncing, actually). Thirty is ‘ when if you can’t do it, i you can't do it: not because j you’re still young yet but ; because you’re lousy. The full horror of being j 30 can only be deadened 1 by doing something dram- ' atic like getting married (I did). Well, Charles asked five old girl-friends to his party; maybe he considered

drawing lots among them. For him, at least, being 30 doesn’t carry the agonising questions it does for many: wondering if you’re far enough up the ladder, wondering if you’re on the right ladder; wondering if you’ll ever make it to the top. Being born at - the top certainly lets you off that one. But he maybe has one problem the rest of us do not have. By the time they’re 30 most people have a notion of how they’re shaping up: they either are, or are not, being given the demanding tasks and the steps to promotion; they either have, or haven’t, managed to make a bit of money, get the house they want, breed some half-way tolerable children. Where are your landmarks, if you’re a royal? In the popularity ratings? In the amount of press coverage you get as you stride round, arms behind your back, inspecting huge pieces of machinery, smiling at dignitaries, shaking people by the hand while wearing the right uniform? Seems a strange sort of life for a grown man. His father does it, of course—and Prince Charles, when asked why they both walked with their hands behind, said: “We both go to the same tailor and he makes our shirts so tight we can’t get our hands round to the front.” This was what did for Edward VII (not the shirt, the lack of anything to do). No-one would give

him a proper job, no-one would let him help run the country: no wonder he took to puffing round after ladies like Lily Langtry. It’s been suggested, indeed. that Prince Charles should step into his mother’s shoes ahead of time, but she shows no signs of sliding out of them; and anyway royals aren’t allowed to run the country these days, they'd get into trouble if they tried.

So what, to put it bluntly, has he got to look forward to? More pomp; more circumstance; more diplomacy; a million more hands to shake. When they sent Prince Charles off to a rugged, unconventional school in Australia I was among the scoffers; it struck me as absurd that they should think a monarch was having a more modern education if he learned to put up his own tent and cut up his own fish-bait than if he merely sat in a small room learning about statecraft.

But I see now the purpose of it all —as of the horses, the polo and the training with ships, inside the Navy and out.

It was all designed to give the boy. not a sense of kingship or identity with his people or a modern, thrusting sense of purpose. No nonsense of that order. It was simply designed, in among the banquets and the ceremonies, the open-' ings and the handshakes, to give the poor fellow something to do.

WHITEHORNS WORLD Katharine Whitehorn