Monarchy will stand firm

 

When Bill Clinton teased Monica Lewinsky's rima with his cigar and ejaculated over her shoulder, no one suggested that the United States should rid itself of the presidency. The institution was regarded as larger than the man. But here, it seems, this is not how we see the monarchy. In Britain, we have a butler drip-feeding us gossip about the royal family, a sometime valet to the Prince of Wales claiming to have been the victim of homosexual rape no fewer than five times and, from other sources, all sorts of Palace tittletattle and below-stairs innuendo.

Some headlines would have us believe that the monarchy is on the brink of collapse, that this crescendo of rumour, prattle, disclosure and broken confidence is the Windsors' Watergate, and others, marginally less shrill, have questioned the monarchy's ability to survive what they and their peers have whipped into the appearance of a scandal.

Why should the monarchy not survive? The American presidency was not destroyed by Watergate - Nixon resigned, but the presidency, unscathed, continued. The difference is that presidents are elected for not more than two terms and then depart for prosperous retirement, but hereditary monarchs may go on for ever - but not always. Have we learned nothing from the past?

Myth has it that we cheerfully murdered William Rufus nine centuries ago for being anti-clerical and homosexual. Fact has it that seven centuries ago Edward II we wittily sodomised to death with a redhot poker, again for being homosexual. Nearly a century later we deposed Richard II to prove that we could rid ourselves of any unlovable monarch for almost any reason, and several decades on we deposed Henry VI for sheer incompetence. In the 17th century we decapitated Charles I for his belief in the Divine Right of Kings and exiled his son, James II, for being Roman Catholic.

We have ever since managed our monarchs so that they have never bested their ministers, the abdication and expulsion of Edward VIII proving that point in 1936. Perhaps, if we had told the Queen to abdicate after her Silver Jubilee - just for boring us - the present stew in which she and Prince Charles now find themselves would never have occurred.

Seven times since 1066 we have killed or expelled a king. At least as many times we have managed or adjusted the succession, and countless times the monarch has, on major issues, been the puppet of his ministers.

What we have now is a constitutional monarchy that is, apart from the old-fashioned reverence we pay it, utterly powerless; its prime purpose is to provide convenient camouflage for the autocracy of a prime minister with powers that equal - and in some areas exceed - those of the president of the USA.

Most of us are content to have a titular head of state born to this role, antediluvian and primitive though the notion is, for it gives the illusion of democracy to the position of prime minister.

As a hereditary monarch is not the subject of election, he is neither a political animal nor a political appointee - and that must surely be better than Mrs Kinnock or Lord Archer taking over at Buck House after slugging it out at the hustings with party funding and support, for as sure as eggs is eggs, that is what confronts us if we jettison the monarchy.

Do we really think the monarchy is rocked by the recollections of a butler and the belated intervention of the Queen to silence him? Those of us not particularly entertained by below-stairs gossip feel that the Queen's error was in not putting a stop to the Burrell affair before it began.

As we are so often told that she reads every daily newspaper and is astonishingly abreast of the news, it seems inconceivable that she could have been unaware of Burrell's predicament from its very beginning, all the more so if she believes his squirrelling away 342 of Princess Diana's possessions to have been entirely honest and honourable.

Even if she believed the squirrelling to be venal, a planned theft, what did it matter to a family so rich if a few jewelled baubles from Asprey's went astray, a dress or two, an Ascot hat, a dozen letters from the waste-paper basket? What is the point of having equerries if not to twist an errant butler's arm and secure the return of damaging tapes and documents if he is known to have them?

All that can be said now, the damage done, is that the Queen was a silly old bat not to realise the significance of Burrell's words in that lengthy conversation years ago - if it ever took place. Even without that conversation, she was foolish not to rap everyone's knuckles at the first sniff of a policeman and stop the business short. If ever an affair should have been kept within the family, this was it.

And what have we now? We have a butler whom half the press thought queer when he first came into the public eye on Diana's death - "There's a poof if ever I saw one," the general reaction, "never mind the wife and kids" - now vouched for as at least bisexual by none other than Michael Barrymore.

We have a tale of Burrell on the Royal Yacht orgying with sailors. We have him buying pornography for the princes Will and Harry. We have his two teenage sons at the acne stage, wondering if they too carry a homosexual gene, the most embarrassed boys in Christendom - imagine the ribbing when they return to school.

We also have George Smith, a guardsman before he became a valet, claiming that he was raped by one of Prince Charles's aides. Have we ever heard anything more improbable?

A guardsman raped by an ordinary mortal? A hefty sixfooter from one of the regiments notorious for buggering elderly gentlemen for a small fee, their wares much touted by members of the Reform and Travellers' Clubs, raped by some effete Etonian equerry?

It is difficult to believe that any guardsman is unaware of the regimental tradition, that any guardsman could be taken by surprise - and yet this guardsman was attacked again, he says, by the same gentleman of the Prince's household, and three times since on the streets of Hanwell and Feltham not infamous for sodomy since the cavalry ceased to camp on Hounslow Heath.

But does it matter what a man's servants do in bed - or standing up in a canoe? Why are they servants? Gone are the days when service was the only alternative to slavery in agriculture, factories and mines - service is now a career chosen by those who enter it. And what manner of man would choose to be the intimate servant of another, fussing over his underpants, running his bath, scrubbing his back, wiping his bottom, if he were not at least a little queer?

Is there even a problem - other than the appalled reaction of the average editor - if, on occasion, a master beds his servant? Let us remember the 18th century folk-song of the flaxen- headed ploughboy, driven by ambition to sleep with both his master and his mistress - that way, so great a man I'll be; and let us remember too the rhyme of the Earl of Rochester a century earlier, telling of his anger on finding himself alone in bed: "I storm, and I roar, and I fall in a rage, And missing my whore, I bugger my page."

Is any of this good reason to replace the monarchy?

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