What a boring royal blackmail story

The royal blackmail story is remarkable for the absence of outrage

Rod Liddle

31 October 2007

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The gay sex and drugs allegations were met with a huge shrug

But more to the point, the thing which has changed even more dramatically is our relationship with the royal family. Might I suggest that some of the mystique, the natural deference, the regard has, well, evaporated? Call me a prude, but I don’t think things have ever been the same since it was reported that Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, announced in a private correspondence to Camilla Parker Bowles that he would like to be reincarnated as one of her tampons. Reported, I ought to add, with enormous glee and jubilation.

To be sure, the Diana business — all of it, from those staged, crassly manipulative photographs of her looking distraught in front of the Taj Mahal, to the affair with the unpalatable Dodi Fayed and the terrible denouement — diminished the royal family in the eyes of the public and sucked from the institution vast reservoirs of respect. But Charles more than held his own for the republican cause. What on earth will they get up to next, we wondered to ourselves, when the tampon stuff hit the papers? At first the myriad transgressions were front-page news — Charles commending Islam, Charles ordering seven boiled eggs for breakfast in case he wasn’t happy with the consistency of the yolk, Phil doing his usual xenophobic stuff while on royal visits, that delayed and hurried wedding of Charles and Camilla — until we all became bored with both, paradoxically, their shocking ordinariness and their silly idiosyncrasies. At the behest of a new breed of spin doctors and a sharp new government, the royal family attempted to be more accessible to their subjects while simultaneously continuing with the pretence that they were in some way exalted human beings. But you can’t have it both ways.

The problem, then, for the palace publicity monkeys — as I suspect they are well aware — isn’t the outrage which might be occasioned by this ham-fisted attempt at blackmail, but the utter lack of it. Drugs? Gay sex? Yeah, sure, we’d swallow all of that, no problem. Tell us something new.