Waving The Bloody Shirt

National Review Online,  January 18, 2005

Gott im Himmel, what was Harry thinking? If you are a public figure, the great grandson of the last emperor of India no less, and you live in censorious—and camera-phone-saturated—times, attending a "Native and Colonial" party is almost certainly unwise. To do so in Nazi uniform is absolute madness. And after days of high drama, low farce, and massed denunciations, we all know the result. The "Clown Prince" and the Circus

To take just a brief selection of the criticism, Harry is now the "Hitler Youth" (the Sun, a newspaper that dilutes its moments of moral indignation with bouts of manic punning), "the most tasteless fool in the country" (London Times), and "an idiot" (Independent). Perhaps more worrying for the "clown prince" (Sun, again), the principal prominenti to rally to his support were David Irving (a historian often accused of Holocaust revisionism), a disgraced Tory MP, and Fergie.

It would have done nothing for the Night Porter, but Harry's has been the shirt seen 'round the world, the mother of all wardrobe malfunctions, a poor, sad scrap of bad taste, a feeble facsimile of an Afrika Korps tunic, garnished with a swastika armband, a touch that the late Field Marshal Erwin Rommel would, I suspect, have found somewhat vulgar.

And yes, it was a dumb, dumb thing to do. Stupid rather than malicious, but, particularly given Harry's status, it was clearly inappropriate—and genuinely offensive to many. Quite rightly, the prince was quick to issue an apology. That should have been an end to the matter. That it was not says plenty about modern Britain and contemporary Europe, little of it good.

To be sure, the British press was always going to keep the story alive for as long as it could. Royal scandals shift newspapers, and so do the Nazis. Combining the two was a circulation manager's dream. Even allowing for this, however, the torrent of humbug, hypocrisy, and hysteria that has engulfed the hapless Harry has been remarkable and, in some ways, rather more repellent than the wretched regalia that sparked the uproar in the first place. It also ignores the fact, critical to understanding this incident, that for many Brits, the Nazis have long been good for a laugh.

Now, Harry is not, by most accounts, much of an intellectual, so to claim that his brown-shirted burlesque was somehow a deliberate Producers-style satire is a stretch too far. At the same time, his dreadful choice of costume, however dimly, however unconsciously, reflected a national fondness for making a mockery of the pretensions of the Third Reich. On occasion this can be tasteless, but ridicule is not a bad way to strip the swastika of some of its malign power. The failure of neo-fascists ever to make much progress in the U.K. (unlike in some other European countries) can at least partly be put down to the fact that voters have been too busy laughing to take them very seriously.

Some press comment in Britain did allude to this tradition, but a good number of journalists took the chance to indulge in royal-bashing and class warfare. It was a wonderful opportunity to give the toffs a good kicking, while appearing to remain on the moral high ground. The Guardian is usually a good source for this sort of thing. It didn't disappoint. To take just a quick dip into the venom, we find John O'Farrell frantic and foaming over "pro-hunting upper-class twits," sly hints from Mark Lawson that the evil Tories are far more likely to dress up in Nazi uniform than their political opponents and a reminder from Duncan Campbell that Edward VIII had "admired what Hitler was doing in Germany."

In Germany itself, reactions were no less vitriolic, and, reflecting exasperation at the U.K.'s endless, and frequently crass, obsession with the Second World War, included some Brit-bashing for added flavor. The most weirdly entertaining response, however, came from a commentator in the mass-circulation Bild who scribbled this message to Harry. "You are...about as disgusting as a moldy piece of food. I vomit. It is high time that you were given serious medical treatment. You are a traumatized child."

Getting it exactly wrong, meanwhile, Der Spiegel described the uniform of the Afrika Korps as being "hated" in the U.K. because of British casualties in the desert war. In fact, the reverse is true. The soldiers of Rommel's army have traditionally been seen as the "good" Germans, worthy opponents beaten in a fair fight. If, as was apparently nearly the case, Harry had opted, God help us, for a SS uniform, the row would have been far, far worse.

Adding to the frenzy, and showing that, even now, after nearly six decades of democratic government, they do not fully understand the occasionally uncomfortable realities of free speech, some German politicians used Harry's gaffe to lobby for a Europe-wide ban on the display of Nazi symbols. Such a ban would be a mistake on a number of grounds, but it is interesting to see that there was no suggestion that it should also cover Communist insignia. Why not? Do the tens of millions who died under the hammer and sickle count for any less than those butchered by the Hitler regime? To look at this point another way, ask yourself if there would have been such uproar if Harry had come dressed as a Stalin-era commissar or clutching Mao's Little Red Book. You know the answer.

As if that level of hypocrisy was not enough, it seems that even some fascists, real ones, may be regarded as less of a scandal than the wayward Windsor. Le Monde has reportedly suggested that the furor over Harry may hit London's chances of winning the right to host the 2012 Olympics over rivals such as Paris, the capital of a country where some15 percent of voters regularly give their support to the National Front, a party headed by a man who has described the Holocaust as a "detail."

More ominously still, this wave of indignation over a spoiled and irrelevant young prince makes a revealing contrast with Europe's supine response to Islamic extremists, the brownshirts of our own era. But, perhaps we should not be surprised. How much simpler, and politically more convenient, to condemn one moronic 20-year-old, his unpopular social class, and (internationally) his countrymen, than to confront the real danger to freedom now developing among a section of the EU's Muslim minority. Facing this challenge will be a tricky task not easily reconciled with the multicultural pieties of Europe's ruling establishment, or, arguably, the pockets of anti-Semitism that may lurk within it. Symbolic solidarity with the vanished victims of the past is so, so much less demanding.

Ironically, however, these politics of the empty gesture reached their nadir with the suggestion by the Simon Wiesenthal Center (an organization which should know better) that Harry should be made to attend the commemoration at Auschwitz of the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation. Such a grotesque stunt, both morbid and meaningless, would have been an insult to those murdered in that terrible place. Thankfully, the idea was rejected.

In this squalid and sorry saga, it was a rare moment of dignity.

Diana, Again

National Review Online, October 6, 2001

There is, let's admit it, something grimly satisfying about having a prejudice confirmed. So, if you are one of those people who believe that there is absolutely nothing more to say about Charles and Di, Christopher Andersen's new work, Diana's Boys, is the book for you. Once again weary readers are presented with the same shop-soiled menagerie (mean queen, pained prince, plain Camilla, horrible Hewitt, foolish Fergie, loveable Tiggy, playboy Dodi), the same exhausted anecdotes (hysteria at Highgrove, bulimia in the palace, Charles' confession of adultery, Diana's TV interview, the rudeness at Harry's birth), and, above all, that same doomed, fascinating heroine, bewitching and manipulative, a Sybil in Chanel, with her bewildering, ever-shifting personality leading all those around her to ruin and to despair.

We know how her story will end, of course. We are told again about those last tragic hours in Paris, that speedy departure from the Ritz and the disaster in a tunnel, hours that will be particularly familiar to fans of Mr. Andersen, in that he had already discussed them at some length in an earlier bestseller, The Day Diana Died. Now, Mr. Andersen, the author of two books about Katharine Hepburn, three volumes about the Kennedys, and two works about Princess Diana, is clearly a man who is not too worried about reworking a profitable subject. It is best, however, if such a return to the mother lode can be justified by the claim that something fresh is being discovered. The kindly Ms. Hepburn has, most obligingly for her biographers, been very long-lived, leaving plenty of room for the two, doubtless distinct, efforts by Mr. Andersen, Young Kate and The Remarkable Love Story of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The Kennedys enjoyed far less staying power than the formidable actress, but, in their case Mr. Andersen could, presumably, reduce the risk of repeating himself by moving across, then down, the former First Family tree. He followed Jack and Jackie with Jackie after Jack, and then, in a confirmation of his mortuary franchise, he gave us The Day John Died.

In Diana's case, however, going back to the celebrity seam was not so straightforward. The inconveniently dead princess lacked Ms. Hepburn's powers of survival. A "Young Diana" was all there ever was, and all there ever would be. There were no long decades, just a few short years filled with incident, almost all of which Mr. Andersen had already chronicled. The Kennedy alternative, harvesting the family tree, was also tricky in the case of the gloomy royals. Compared with JFK the poor princess lacked a sellable surviving spouse. Who, other than Camilla, who would go for Charles after Diana?

That only left the sons, William and Harry, in Diana's words, her "one splendid achievement", and so they appear to be. But as camouflage for an opportunistic retelling of the Spencer story, her offspring prove hopelessly inadequate. This is hardly their fault. They may, in the words of Mr. Andersen's publisher be "the world's two most celebrated royals" (eat your heart out, Elizabeth), but they simply have not done enough to carry a biography. This would be true of almost any teenager. Diana's children are no exception, as a quick glance at this book's index reveals.

Entries under "William, Prince" include "backside pinching of… e-mail romances of…formality disliked by… Harry dangled from window by." Take away the story of their parents, and the Windsor princelings' lives are the stuff of trivia. While that is not a bad level for Mr. Andersen's writing style ("Finally, the Princess of Wales leaned forward to see what the boys' found so riveting: steamy photos of the buxom Barbi twins, Playboy centerfold models Shane and Sia") he is astute enough to know that, when it comes to book sales, his best hopes still lie with Diana. So, much of what we get is a tired rehash of a failed marriage and a tragic death, with, on occasion, the only variety coming, quite literally, from the pagination.

On page 43 of Diana's Boys, for instance, we can read that "William's mother indulged in an orgy of self-mutilation. At various times, Diana slashed her wrist with a razor, stabbed herself in the chest with a pocketknife, cut herself with the jagged edge of a lemon peeler, and hurled herself against a glass display case, shattering it." This is a drama that may be familiar to admirers of page 49 of The Day Diana Died where readers are told that "in an orgy of self-mutilation, at various times Diana slashed her wrist with a razor, stabbed herself in the chest with a pocketknife, cut herself with the jagged edge of a lemon peeler, and hurled herself against a glass display case, shattering it."

The only difference between these two accounts lies in the description of its protagonist. In Diana's Boys the lemon-peeler-wielding princess is also, in keeping with the theme of a book allegedly focused on her sons, described as "William's mother," rather than just the "Diana" used in the earlier text.

To be fair, there are some revelations (at least to this Brit) in the more recent book. I was, for example, unaware of the fact that, in an unorthodox variant of the curt handshake generally preferred by the English upper classes, one socialite allegedly prefers to greet Prince William by putting her hand down the front of his trousers. For the most part, however, even those parts of Diana's Boys that relate specifically to the children cover fairly familiar ground, if in ever more excruciating detail. In The Day Diana Died, Mr. Andersen tells us that William once "tried to flush his father's shoe down the toilet", while in Diana's Boys, we learn that they were "four-hundred-dollar" shoes.

More excruciating for William, should he ever look at this book, will be the speculation about his love life, speculation helpfully illustrated by an inspired selection of photographs that manages to include seductive pictures of no fewer than three cuties whose names (Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Emma Parker Bowles, Davina Duckworth-Chad) seem more substantial than the outfits that they are wearing. For the time being, however, both the young princes seem remarkably well balanced given what they have been through, but it is difficult to read Mr. Andersen's book without wondering whether Diana's boys are destined to share some of the bleaker aspects of their parents' fate.

For, while the source of many of Charles and Diana's problems lay in their own personalities (well summarized in Sally Bedell Smith's Diana in Search of Herself, psychobabble-heavy, but nevertheless the best single account of the whole miserable saga) other factors were also very much to blame. In particular, the royal couple had to contend with the challenge of living in a country that no longer knew what it wanted from its monarchy. Like their predecessors, the prince and princess were public figures, but the public had changed. To their cost, Charles and Diana were to discover that the old deference was dead, taking with it the stuffily comfortable etiquette that once cocooned the inhabitants of Buckingham Palace. It had been replaced by a relentlessly intrusive tabloid-driven agenda that mixed class resentment and prurience with the curiously old-fashioned notion that the Royal Family should set some sort of example, although no one seemed to be able to agree on what that example should be.

It is worth remembering that when, in the bawling, mawkish week that followed Diana's death, the formerly vilified princess was being sanctified for allegedly being able to show her true feelings, the Queen was at the same time coming under attack in the press ("Show us you care") for failing to fake hers. What Fleet Street wanted from Her Majesty ("Speak to us Ma'am — Your people are suffering") was a blubbering expression of regret for a former daughter-in-law she clearly no longer really cared for.

Poor William ("the heir") and, to a lesser extent, Harry ("the spare") face a lifetime of trying to satisfy the conflicting, unclear, and capricious demands of such scrutiny, of which Mr. Andersen's book is an early, and relatively harmless, example.

No wonder William is said to doubt whether he wants to be king.