Our Times

by A. N. Wilson

  President Kennedy once joked, ‘I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.’ But he said it from the position of being the most powerful man, and one of the most promiscuous lovers, in the world. Prince Charles was unsure of himself, inwardly in need of friends to flatter him, older men to advise him, women to comfort him. ‘At least I know my place now. I’m nothing more than a carrier of flowers for my wife.’11 Anthony Powell was wise to say that it is envy, more often than jealousy, which breaks up marriages.

  Diana was not a clever person in the intellectual sense of the word, but she possessed the quality which all truly great figures in history have, of knowing how to use her weaknesses to her own advantage. The fact (if it was a fact) that she was desolated by her husband’s infidelity, that she felt cold-shouldered by the Royal Family, that she suffered from eating disorders and barely controllable mood swings, would, in a lesser person, have ruled her out of public life. Like other unhappy royal wives, she would have been seen somewhere near the back of the line-up on the balcony at the time of jubilees and royal weddings and, beyond a little light charity work, she would never have been seen out in public. Diana, even before she decided to tell all through the medium of Andrew Morton in his Diana: Her True Story (1992), reached out to the suffering hearts of other people by stripping naked her own. They sensed it, and it was this, combined with her quite extraordinary physical beauty, and by the animation of her face, and by the simply overwhelming personal charm which made her into, what she claimed she was, the Queen of Hearts. This was the moment when chaps in the Prince’s Party, the hunting set, men in their clubs and Nicholas Soames, the rotund grandson of Sir Winston Churchill, would all reach for their sick bags–if in the circumstances the image is pardonable.

  Undoubtedly, the interest expressed in the royal marriage both before and after Diana’s death was as unwholesome as an eating disorder itself. Those of us who developed a compulsion to read and reread the story should have spotted the early warning signals when we first read Andrew Morton’s book, and, having thrown up, started to gobble it up all over again. By the time we were binge-reading Lady Colin Campbell’s The Real Diana, or the unforgettably nasty The Housekeeper’s Diary, almost retching as we turned the pages, but unable to stop ourselves cramming in every last sordid detail, we were on a hopeless spiral. Even junk which was ready-spewed vomit before we read it, such as galloping Captain James Hewitt’s caddish Love and War (spilling the beans about his affair with Diana) or the butler Paul Burrell’s The Way We Were, could still lure us to spoon in their nauseating contents with slurping lack of control.

  There is a danger, however, in confusing the obsession with its object. Because an obsession is unwholesome, this does not make its object unwholesome. The world was right to love Diana and, confused and unhappy as she was, she was a great force for good. The Royal Family, who had felt so threatened by the revolutions in taste and protocol which she effected, were her greatest beneficiaries. James Fox expressed an archetypically conservative viewpoint at the time of her death when he exploded, ‘The people’s heroine, why did we need one? It was celebrity culture meets the democratisation of the monarchy.’12 Precisely. Without such ingredients, the monarchy would have been weaker. Diana paradoxically reminded people of why monarchy is a more satisfactory system of government than republicanism. It allows a focus upon persons, rather than upon institutions. It is cult of personality without any of its sinister or fascistic overtones. Diana needed, wooed, and received wild adoration. But the kind of ‘democratisation of the monarchy’ which James Fox so dreaded did not do any harm to the monarch herself, who drew forth from her people emotions which were different, but in many subjects no less deep: respect, reverence, and a sense which only a person, not an office, can embody, continuation with the past.

  Archbishop Runcie, who had married Charles to Diana, was asked in 1993 whether the people of England would ever be able to tolerate Charles’s love for Camilla. The churchman in Runcie was disappointed that the Prince had clearly lapsed from the mainstream Anglicanism which he had practised as a very young man, serving the altar for Archbishop Ramsey at Lambeth Palace when he was being prepared for confirmation, and for Harry Williams, the Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge. Now, since the advent of Sir Laurens van der Post, the Prince seemed to want to be something called the defender of faiths. So, this coloured Runcie’s outlook, no doubt, when he spoke of whether Charles would ever, after the divorce and the inability to abandon Camilla, be able to inherit the throne. Said Runcie in 1993, ‘It depends whether the Prince wins his way with the British people over the next five to ten years. Also, it would quite help if he loved the Church of England a bit more.’13

  Families are collectively haunted by skeletons in cupboards and events in their past. Looming over the Royal Family throughout Prince Charles’s lifetime was the Abdication Crisis of 1936. Because of his desire to break the marriage laws of the Church and to marry a (twice) divorced woman, Edward VIII was forced to abdicate and banished into exile. His brother the Duke of York became the last King Emperor. George VI’s wife, known throughout Elizabeth II’s reign as the Queen Mother, would have been the mere Duchess of York, rather than a much-loved monarch, if her charming brother-in-law had been allowed to reign with Queen Wallis at his side. Yet there are factors more powerful than logic in human affairs, and in spite of the fact that it had brought her an Imperial Crown, and a manner of life in which she had visibly, and very charmingly, revelled, the Queen Mother continued to regard the Abdication as the ultimate betrayal, and the breaking of the Church’s marriage laws as the one unpardonable royal sin. Throughout our times, nemesis returned, as if it were Wallis’s revenge. First–Princess Margaret had to discard the man she loved, Group Captain Townsend, because he was divorced. Her own marriage to Lord Snowdon ended in divorce. Then, the Queen’s children contracted marriages which unravelled–Princess Anne to a show-jumping captain called Mark Phillips, whose father worked for Wall’s Sausages; Prince Andrew to the daughter of the raffish Major Ronald Ferguson, a horse-loving friend of the Duke of Edinburgh who was found out in a massage parlour called the Wigmore Club; and, much the most problematic from a constitutional viewpoint, there was the collapse of Prince Charles’s marriage to Lady Di.

  It was not until his beloved grandmother Queen Elizabeth died aged 101 that he could contemplate marrying Camilla. But the supreme irony of the whole matter was that without the ‘Diana factor’, without ‘celebrity culture meets democratisation of the monarchy’, he would never, as the supposed future Head of the Church of England, have been able to get married to a divorced woman and remain in the line of succession.

  True, the Church had itself changed its own rules since Edward VIII’s day. It allowed for divorced people to be remarried in church, and there were even bishops and priests who had been divorced and remarried. But it was surely Diana who posthumously helped to blow away the dark cloud of 1936. The monarchy is something more than ‘celebrity culture’, but it is celebrity culture in part. The unfortunate members of the Royal Family, who in earlier ages would have been protected against the intrusions of the press, were now made to suffer the kind of exposure which tortured, as well as enlivened, the existences of film stars and pop singers. But though this made them fair game, in the eyes of the paparazzi and newspaper editors, whenever they staggered half-tight out of a nightclub at 3 a.m., or attempted to have a discreet affair, it also made them less vulnerable to the legalists. The avid public expected celebrities to have love affairs and divorces. Indeed, the readers of celebrity magazines and tabloid newspapers would not have felt they were getting their money’s worth unless the celebrities were seen to be dining at the Ritz with unsuitable partners. When Prince Charles and Camilla were eventually married, it was as if 1936 had never been. A few die-hards continued to say, nonsensically, that they would tolerate the marriage but that Camilla could never be the Queen of England. In deference to their views, perhaps, and in tactful recognition that th
e ‘Princess of Wales’ would, for a long time to come, always be, in most people’s minds, Diana, Camilla was known as the Duchess of Cornwall. But everyone knew that if or when Charles became the King of England, his wife would become the Queen.

  23

  The Union

  Was there a future for the United Kingdom in our times, or would the Union itself break? Since the setting up of the Irish Free State in 1922, it was a question the Welsh and the Scots must have asked themselves from time to time. Northern Ireland had been given devolved power (the Stormont Parliament set up in 1922) against its will. When that power was taken away in 1972 it had protested with even greater vigour. By the end of the conflict, the IRA would have killed 1,800, of whom 465 were soldiers of the British Army. Loyalists killed 990, government forces 363, the army killed 297, the UDR and Royal Irish Regiment 8, the RUC 55. In addition 40,000 had been injured–nearly 3 percent of the population.1

  The progress made by Mr Major in bringing this madness to an end led to a radically revised notion of devolution in all the regions of Britain. As Northern Ireland learned to make peace, with power-sharing across the Irish border and the slow process of making a democratic parliament for themselves in Stormont once again, Wales and Scotland were ready for devolution, too. Since the United Kingdom began there had been Celtic nationalists who wanted its dissolution but their aspirations could not seem realistic either on political or economic terms. British membership of the European Union altered that. Hitherto, membership of the United Kingdom provided the only umbrella by which these countries could survive. The existence of the European Union could offer the dream that Scotland could sit down in the Councils of Europe as an equal partner with France, that Wales, having cast off the English yoke, could be an independent member of the Union.

  Whether in practice the EU would accept the applications of Scotland and Wales had not been tested. True, Ireland was an independent member and had done well out of it. But Spain, perpetually embattled by terrorists of the Basque separatist movement, would have resisted moves for an independent Wales, Cornwall or Scotland if this appeared to strengthen the arm of the terrorists on their own soil. Meanwhile, the Welsh could enjoy the slightly less impressive spectacle of their fellow countrymen exploiting British membership of Europe for all–and even for slightly more than all–it was worth. Anecdote began to circulate the cattle markets of West Wales of subsidised farmers writing down the extravagant shoe purchases of their wives in Freeman, Hardy and Willis in Swansea as ‘agricultural wellington boots’. And there were jobs for the Welsh-speaking boys and girls in Brussels, translating every single piece of EU legislation and bureaucratic verbiage into Welsh.

  Monolingualism in Wales had vanished by the time of the Second World War, and the numbers who spoke both Welsh and English was in steady decline–909,261 in 1931,714,686 in 1951,656,002 in 1961, and 508,207 in 1981.2 It was understandable that Welsh-language enthusiasts should have laboured to preserve their culture, with an expansion of Welsh-speaking schools, an increase in Welsh-language road signs and television programmes, a lavish grant (£300,000 pa in 1988) to the Welsh Books Council and an insistence on the use of Welsh in the professions. This lead to an influx of non-Welsh-speaking Welsh lawyers, businessmen and, to a smaller degree, clergy, to England.

  Welsh nationalism as a political aspiration had, in the twentieth century, been focused at first around the figure of Saunders Lewis, founder and President of Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru. The chief aim of the movement was ‘to take away from the Welsh their sense of inferiority…to remove from our beloved country the mark and the shame of conquest’. He saw the purpose of politics as the defence of civilisation. ‘Civilization is more than an abstraction. It must have a local habitation and a name. Here its name is Wales.’3 Just as de Valera and the Irish nationalists felt a natural kinship with the European right, so Saunders Lewis, who became a Roman Catholic in 1932, saw General Franco and Mussolini as the likely role models should Plaid Cymru ever find itself catapulted into power by an uprising of patriotic desire to undo the shame of Edward I’s conquests. It was understandable that until the 1960s most Nonconformist Chapel–going farmers and professional people in Wales continued to vote Liberal, while the coal miners of Merthyr Tydfil and the steelworkers of Port Talbot remained staunch in their loyalty to the Labour Party.

  But Plaid Cymru evolved, as all political parties do. The 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, had he risen from the dead and met his successor, would probably have been amazed that Mr Major was a Conservative Prime Minister, rather than a Radical. Tony Blair would find himself leading the party of Keir Hardie and Nye Bevan. Plaid Cymru, its early Catholic-fascist principles quietly abandoned, became the party of Welsh-speaking schools, and the translation of medical prescriptions and the Highway Code into the language of the Gogynfeirdd.

  Gwynfor Evans, one of whose first political acts had been the formation of an organisation of Welsh pacifists at the National Eisteddfod of 1937.4 became the leader of Plaid Cymru in 1945. There was something figurative about this gentle man capturing the parliamentary seat of Carmarthen on 14 July 1966. The by-election was fought following the death of Lady Megan Lloyd George.5 the daughter of the last Liberal Prime Minister and in latter days a candidate for the Labour Party. Gwynfor, a law graduate of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, farmed 300 acres at Llangadog. He was the father of seven Welsh-speaking children, a devout Christian, and a teetotaller. He seemed very different from the Free Wales Army, who modelled themselves on the IRA and enjoyed blowing up railway bridges. Nor did he advocate, as did the priest poet R. S. Thomas (who spoke Welsh with a patrician English accent), the torching of English holiday cottages in Wales. But he did concede that his election would not necessarily quieten the men of violence. ‘It does not depend on us. It depends on the Government whether the people use violent means. The Government does not think anyone serious until people start blowing up things or shooting others.’6

  Gwynfor’s vision of Wales and Welshmen had been spiritual. At the beginning of 1980 two thousand members of Plaid Cymru vowed to go to prison rather than pay a television licence to an English-language broadcasting corporation. Gwynfor took the matter to Gandhian levels of heroism by announcing that he would fast unto death if a Welsh channel were not established. The government yielded before he even began his fast and the Welsh Fourth Channel (S4C) was launched on 1 November 1982.7 Meanwhile, Gwynfor lost Carmarthen to the Tories, and Plaid Cymru had moved on to a position where, by the time of the setting up of a Welsh Assembly in 1999, it was mopping up the voters who in the past would have been natural Labour supporters. The Labour Party, by the time the Assembly came, had long since ratted on the ideals which had inspired the socialists of the coal mines and the slate quarries who had thrilled to the egalitarian rhetoric of Tom Jones of Rhymni (the trades unionist, not the singer) or Nye Bevan, or even of Megan Lloyd George.

  One Welsh socialist more loyal than most to the dreams of Old Labour was Ron Davies, who was best known to the public at large (if known at all) for questioning the fitness of the Prince of Wales to ascend the throne and who asked how the Prince could allow his sons to indulge in field sports. A bright boy from the valleys, Ron had progressed from Bassaleg Grammar School, via Portsmouth Polytechnic, to the world of Welsh Labour politics, beginning with a seat on Rhymney Council, rising to take the safe Labour parliamentary seat of Caerphilly in 1983, and eventually to become the Welsh Secretary and the leader of the party in their new Assembly. Alas, on Monday 26 October 1998, only weeks into his new job, he went for a walk in the dark on Clapham Common, a well-known homosexual haunt, and encountered a man who robbed him at knife-point.8

  Davies resigned his Cabinet post at once, in the hope at least of securing his future as Labour leader in the Welsh Assembly. ‘In allowing myself to be placed in this situation, with people I had never met and about whom I knew nothing, I did something very foolish.’9 Three days later, Davies gave a press conference referring to his ‘momen
t of madness’.10 Later he blamed ‘a violent and emotionally dysfunctional childhood’ for his difficulties. Quite what he had done, in what the madness consisted, or why he felt it necessary to resign, he did not explain. Later on, he came to ‘blame the media’ for what was seen by some as ‘a personal tragedy’.11 Most of his constituents continued to support him whatever form his particular madness had taken, but this was not enough to suppress the rise of his rival Rhodri Morgan, a Blairite placeman, to the position of First Welsh Minister. In August he and his wife, Christina, announced that they would be divorcing because of ‘irreconcilable differences’.12

  Was the establishment, at great expense and trouble, of a Welsh Assembly, itself a moment of madness, or the inevitable consequence of half-buried, violent and emotionally dysfunctional historical trauma? Or was it done because the Scots wanted some form of autonomy and it was deemed more judicious to offer the same to Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland rather than seen to be pandering to Scottish separatists?

  As Major’s government lost strength, there was the possibility–indeed certainty–that in the Celtic countries the Conservatives would suffer electoral disaster. In the interwar years, 1918–39, the Conservatives had more MPs than any other party in Scotland.13 In 1955 they had secured the majority of Scottish seats and a majority of the Scottish vote.14 By 1987 there were a mere eleven Tory MPs, not enough to make up the necessary sixteen, which composes a parliamentary committee at Westminster. When bills relevant to Scotland came before the Westminster Parliament and reached the committee stage it became necessary to fill up the committees with English MPs. By 1997, the Scottish Tories were completely wiped out–without a single Westminster MP. Many factors contributed to the Conservative decline, though the chief of them could be summed up in the two words, ‘Margaret Thatcher’, whose attempt to impose the Poll Tax on the unwilling Scots was only the coup de grâce after a decade of high unemployment and financial hardship.