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                                                                                DYNASTIES, Page 62

A Royal Pain for the Crown


Topless pictures of Fergie, Diana's phone canoodling: Can the
Windsors survive this summer of discontent?

By PAUL GRAY -- With reporting by Helen Gibson/London


    When the time comes for British government leaders to
recommend the next honors list to Queen Elizabeth II, they might
consider bestowing titles of some sort on Mia Farrow and Woody
Allen. After all, the noisy bust-up of the American film stars'
12-year relationship served the British monarchy handsomely by
shoving off the front pages of frenzy-feeding tabloids the
photographs of a topless Duchess of York, a.k.a. Fergie,
cavorting poolside with her American boyfriend in the presence
of her two royal daughters at a rented St.-Tropez villa.

    But the salacious news about someone else, for a change,
brought no lasting respite for the beleaguered House of Windsor.
Up popped a transcript of an alleged telephone conversation
between Diana, Princess of Wales, and a male friend on New
Year's Eve 1989. He calls her "Squidgy" and repeats, "I love
you, I love you." She mentions the "torture" of her marriage and
agrees to a meeting with her phone partner "next Tuesday," under
guise of a visit to her acupuncturist. True? Who cares, when
40,000 Britons paid $22 each on the first day to call a special
phone line and listen to the tape? Three days after this
bombshell, the Sun, Britain's raciest tabloid, announced it
possessed another juicy phone transcript, this one of a
conversation between Fergie and Prince Andrew in January 1990.
During this call, the paper claimed, the duchess said she wanted
to escape the marriage and go off to Argentina, where her mother
lives after bolting from her father. Andrew and Fergie separated
in March of this year.

    These scandals capped a spring and summer of monarchical
discontent. In April the palace announced that after two years
of separation, Princess Anne would divorce Captain Mark
Phillips, her husband of 18 years. June saw the publication of
journalist Andrew Morton's best seller on Princess Diana,
portraying in excruciating detail the travails of a young woman
trapped in a cold and loveless marriage. Morton's accounts of
her five suicide attempts and struggles with the eating disorder
bulimia were shocking enough. Worse, by monarchists' reckonings,
were the signs that Morton had enjoyed the cooperation of
Diana's friends and relatives, who presumably would not have
talked had the princess told them not to. More than a few
interested observers surmised that the wife of the current heir
-- Prince Charles -- and the mother of the heir presumptive --
Prince William -- was building a case in the court of public
opinion for an eventual divorce.

    Much of the world remains fascinated by the pomp and
circumstances of the Windsors. But British subjects pay a
considerable freight, estimated at as much as $140 million from
the national budget per year, for the upkeep of an ever
extending royal family. Many have begun to wonder whether the
investment is worth it. What is this younger generation coming
to? And aren't there rather a lot of them? And what are they
good for, besides embarrassing themselves, titillating us
commoners and boosting the circulation of tabloids? A Sunday
Express poll conducted just after the Fergie topless pictures
hit the newsstands found that 61% of respondents thought the
summer's dirt had caused "lasting damage to the image of the
Royal Family." Only 42% believed Britain would have a monarchy
50 years from now.

    Is this really a constitutional crisis, as some are
suggesting, comparable to the uproar surrounding Edward VIII's
abdication in 1936? Or is it merely a sign that the relentless
bottom feeders among British newspapers have gobbled out of
control?

    So far, the monarchy faces no immediate danger. Despite
the misadventures of her children and in-laws, Queen Elizabeth
is widely revered by her subjects. Few, no matter how
republican in sympathies, are talking seriously about tossing
Her Majesty out after 40 dedicated years on the throne. Enoch
Powell, a former Conservative Party Cabinet minister and an
authority on constitutional matters, argues that passing blips
like the Fergie photographs cannot hurt the enduring power of
the crown because Britain "is not governed by something called
the royal family. It is governed by the single person of the
sovereign."

    Such defenses are technically correct, but they ignore an
anomaly that has been introduced into British public life by
none other than the House of Windsor itself. As reigning Kings
lost their real power, they had to find other reasons for the
monarchy's existence. Queen Victoria, who ascended the throne
in 1837, settled on an answer that has come back to haunt her
descendants. Along with Albert, her beloved prince consort, she
buttressed her sovereignty with the admonition that the royal
family would set by example the moral tone for the nation and
the empire. Collective good conduct became a justification for
authority and privilege. Duty, self-sacrifice, fidelity in
service to the public weal and in Christian marriage were all
to be embodied in word and deed by the monarch and her clan.

    Victoria proved remarkably blameless in her public
conduct, but it has been less and less easy for her descendants.
There were problems with her eldest son as Prince of Wales and
later as Edward VII -- a remarkable womanizer and rakehell by
the standards of any era. But George V and George VI,
Elizabeth's father, who assumed the crown after Edward VIII's
abdication, were devoted family men who publicly upheld their
roles as Defender of the Faith. The present Queen, in the 45th
year of her marriage to Prince Philip, has never personally
attracted a breath of scandal.

    But she did open up, tentatively, some heretofore private
aspects of royal life to TV cameras. Perhaps she assumed this
powerful new medium would enhance her inherited institution and
reinforce, with pictures, Victoria's concept of the monarchy as
the nation's moral ideal.

    Barring the electronic media entirely would probably not
have worked, but giving them access has been a debacle.
Buckingham Palace -- meaning the largely blue-blooded coterie
of managers who run the affairs of the royal family -- has been
stampeded in the TV and tabloid rush to invade every area of
formerly forbidden turf. The palace guidelines approving
appropriate press coverage of family pageants, such as Charles'
investiture as Prince of Wales and the royal weddings, have
failed to keep curiosity about other royal activities off
limits. But a family that promotes its triumphant moments on TV
cannot expect that the cameras will refrain from focusing on
less attractive episodes.

    What will happen when the Queen is gone? A genuine
reconciliation between Charles and Diana leading to a long and
visible happy-ever-after seems unlikely. The question then is
whether society now deems a fairy-tale marriage essential to the
monarchy's survival. In the meantime, the royal antics have
sparked some heterodox ideas about the current state of the
institution. An Independent newspaper editorial titled "Family
values" called for restricting annual allocations from the civil
list just to the Queen and the Prince of Wales. Pressure is also
building on Queen Elizabeth II to reciprocate for the
government's largesse by paying taxes, just like her subjects.
The rest of the family would have to pay their own way.

    Would tourists still flock to London to watch the lesser
royals queue up at bus stops or elbow their way through soccer
crowds? Would the British really relish a workaday monarchy like
Denmark's? The problem with all solutions to the current
problems of the royals is that their historically entrenched
tradition is profoundly irrational. Early in Victoria's reign,
Walter Bagehot wrote of the crown, "Its mystery is its life. We
must not let in daylight upon magic." Sometime, probably not
very far in the future, the British people will have to decide
whether they want the magic or the daylight, since having both
at one time is simply not working at all.