by David Stubbs
Forgive me for not knowing precisely who you are but with respect, that is not of the greatest importance. The matter I’m touching on is far too important for me to be overly concerned with niceties.
There are a great many of us plain-thinking people who sit in the back of our cars as we trundle reluctantly through the capital city and wonder just who on earth built and commissioned these enormous great slate-grey eyesores, which dominate the London skyline, like so many vertical Bulgarias. The people of Britain are not dead-eyed, robotic rabbits to be herded in and out of dismally lit, polystyrene-ceilinged, strip-lit cubicles. They are not automatons, they are subjects and since no one else will speak out, then it must fall to me.
The soul of England is not rectangular, the spirit of England is not functional, the mettle of England is not stainless steel – indeed this whole ‘modernist’ trend has gone a jolly sight too far. I sometimes wonder if I bang on about this sort of thing too much but my staff who are not afraid to contradict me tell me I do not – so there it is.
Now I am not decrying the twentieth century as a whole. There have been certain advantages, I will concede: dentistry, The Three Degrees and I daresay one or two others. But hang it all, we’ve become so infatuated with our gadgets, our washing machines, our microwaving ovens that hang it all, we’ve lost touch with nature: the trees, the hedgerows, the marshes and thickets, what have you … the stuff of a vanished, merrier, cement-less golden age. Can we not have both Three Degrees and Thickets?
Yours, in harmony with Nature
HRH The Prince of Wales
The Culture Secretary
House of Commons
London
England
22 January 1987
Dear Sir
See here, I wonder if you or one of your top people could help me with something that’s been nagging me for days? It’s this tune that’s been running through my head. I’ve obviously picked it up from the transistor radio or television set. Goes something like this:
Dum-dum, dum-dum, DE-dum, dee-dee, de—dum … tarara dum-dum, de-dum … de DUM DUM (big push, there), dum-dum, dum-dum.
One of my staff suggested perhaps it was from something called ‘Shake’n’Vac’. Is it, do you think? I’d ask my wife but well, she just rolls her eyes and retreats to the latrine whenever I ask a civil question. I’ve had my staff working on it for a week now, but really they have far more important things to do, so I was hoping to offload this one on you. There must still be people from Bletchley – you know, those code-breaker johnnies – on the books. Perhaps you could contact your equal at the MOD and check?
No rush, but it you could get back to me – say, this time tomorrow – you’d have no idea of the service you’d be doing your future king.
Yours, maddened
HRH The Prince of Wales
The Culture Secretary
House of Commons
London
England
23 January 1987
Dear Sir
Still not heard back from you regarding this tune. Bureaucratic backlog, I suppose – something must be done about that. It’s still buzzing around in my head and bugging me like the Dickens.
In order to move forward with this, I’ll be dispatching one of my staff down to the Commons to call in at your office in person after she’s finished here. I’ll brief her by humming the tune to her and she will hum it to you, then we can go ahead on that basis and resolve this once and for all. If you could arrange that she gets the necessary clearance, I’d be most grateful.
Yours, no less maddened
HRH The Prince of Wales
Nicholas Edwards
Secretary of State for Wales
House of Commons
London
England
22 February 1989
Dear Mr Edwards
What with its slate mines, singing, hills, striking rain-gauge readings and vales, Wales really is most terribly interesting. But it seems Wales has got down at heel. As its prince, I feel a responsibility to buck it up a bit. Hang it all, something has to be done otherwise it’s in danger of bringing up the rear among the Home Nations, sort of shambling along with a rope around its neck.
So, how are we going to bring Wales up to scratch? I’ve jotted down a few ideas:
• The language: I’ve had a stab at it, but it’s quite fiendish. I suggest we simply get rid of, say, 30% of the consonants and replace them with vowels. Which consonants and vowels in particular and whereabouts you swap them around, I’ll leave to you to sort out.
• The coal mines: Let’s reopen a few but none of your new technology. Let’s get back to the days of steam power, ventilation furnaces, pit ponies, pick axes, canaries – closer to nature. Yes, it was dangerous, but how much more dangerous to lose your national soul, dammit?
• The rarebit: Is this an animal? Perhaps you could check, because if it is, I suspect its stocks are dwindling faster than those of the Dartford Warbler.
• Singing: Welsh people don’t sing as often as they used to, in my experience. What can be done to correct this?
Yours, in Welshness
HRH The Prince of Wales
John Prescott
House of Commons
London
England
20 February 1998
Dear Mr Prescott
I’d like you to offer my apologies once again for mistaking you for one of my catering staff – a lot of the fellows who work in this capacity hail from northern climes, this being the source of my blunder. I’ve done it before, I know, and I shall doubtless do it again, but this makes it no less regrettable.
I must commend you, while I have your ear, for the terrific work you’re doing in the regions. In the hurly burly of modern life we rather tend to take places like Grimsby for granted, but there’s never any chance of that when the likes of you are ‘in the chair’. I listen to you and at once I think to myself, ‘Grimsby’. For this, and for having ascended from such humble origins, you must be ‘reet proud’ of yourself, old chap!
Yours, in (non-political) comradeship
HRH The Prince of Wales
Stephen Byers
Secretary of State for Trade and Industry
House of Commons
London
England
30 December 1999
Dear Mr Byers
Well, the new Millennium is almost upon us and if many of the newspapers are to believed, a certain poetic justice is about to be served in that the vast banks of computers which shore up our modern lifestyle are about to plunge us back into the year 1900. Fascinating … H.G. Wells couldn’t have made it up.
I have taken my own precautions. In secret, I have had several of my best men working round the clock to dig me an underground shelter on my grounds at Highgrove, lined with aluminium and stocked with tinned foods, utensils, changes of clothes and even a makeshift convenience. It is there that I propose to ‘sit out’ the chaos likely to ensue the moment Big Ben strikes twelve. I have extended an open invitation to my family to join me, but they have simply issued me with what in effect amounts to the ‘raspberry’. And so, it will be just myself, alone, and four members of my staff (Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles has an invitation to join me, too).
Upon re-emerging, it may well be that life as we know it has been utterly transformed, and not necessarily for the worse. This computer glitch will have catapulted us back to a fairer, less industrialised era, in which men are closer to the soil. Society may have to be re-thought, rebuilt from the bottom up, from scratch. Of course, it will be agreed that the first thing we will need is a monarchy, which is why I’m going to such lengths to ensure my own self-preservation. It may be that I am one of the last men of the old world still standing, but the human cornerstone of a coming New Age. I find that I am strangely calm, all things considered.
Yours, as New Dawn breaks
HRH The Prince of Wales
The Secretary of State for Edu
cation
House of Commons
London
England
16 October 2000
Dear whoever you are (I apologise – I’ve been gardening, not had time to check).
Recently there’s been a lot of talk about expanding the number of places available to our young people in higher education. On the face of it, this all seems well and laudable but when we dig a little deeper – as I have been this morning – is it really what my old second-form master at Gordonstoun would have described as the ‘desideratum’? Aren’t there too many people going to university? They’re talking about 50% of all young people – is that not rather high?
I suppose it piques me because I’m rather proud of the fact that I went to Cambridge and attained a degree, as did my brother Edward – two from the same family is quite some achievement, particularly in this ‘meritocratic’ age. I feel my achievement is being cheapened, however, when in this day and age any Tom, Dick or Darren can stroll into one of our major seats of learning and acquire some spurious degree in ‘Media Studies’ – hang it all, in my day that meant reading the Beano!
Could not these youngsters instead take up work in areas such as agriculture, which I feel is much ignored? Get back to the land, learn how to thatch a cottage or twine a haystack, the sort of vital skills that will be key if we are to move forward into the twenty-first century – the countryside? Perhaps these young people could find, and in time, know their place there?
Yours
HRH The Prince of Wales (Oxon)
John Prescott
House of Commons
London
England
12 January 2001
Prescott,
Can I distract you momentarily from the Affairs of State and ask you to settle a wager? Is it possible for a man to have a Yorkshire accent and yet not be a socialist? Do please get back to me as soon as possible, as five pounds is riding on this.
Yours, in urgency
HRH The Prince of Wales
John Prescott
House of Commons
London
England
18 May 2001
First, you have a bucket of water thrown over you by members of some ‘punk rock’ group at a pop music awards ceremony. Then you find yourself pelted with eggs by some beefy rustic type in the shires and you respond with your fists in a pugnacious, if not entirely ministerial manner.
As Shakespeare wrote: ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will’. I wonder if there’s a divinity that shapes your particular rough-hewn ends? I mean, it seems as if you’re fated to suffer these episodes. They never seem to happen to Blair, or Harman, or Straw – or the rest of your brigade. Do you think in some way God himself has a hand in these incidents, that they are part of a larger plan in the scheme of which you are, not to be disrespectful, nought but a lump of rude clay to be flung to whatever fate the Deity requires of you?
These are deep thoughts, I agree. I trust they are of help to you as you nurse your bruised knuckles and irritably wave away the press cuttings brought in by your private secretary for your attention.
Yours, in sympathy
HRH The Prince of Wales
John Prescott
House of Commons
London
England
21 May 2001
I don’t seem to have received a reply to the letter I sent you two days ago. I expect you’re busy on the campaign, but just to let you know, the question enclosed in my letter wasn’t intended as a ‘rhetorical’ one. It did require an answer. I’d be grateful to have your response at any time that suits you within the next seventy-two hours.
HRH The Prince of Wales
Jonathon Porritt
Friends of the Earth
26–28 Underwood Street
London
England
28 January 2002
Porritt,
I hate to tear you away from your vital work but I must tell you about a dream I had. I was yomping through open fields with a couple of hounds when I found a clearing and came upon a large assembly of people. And would you know it, each last one of them was holding a length of string and attached to those lengths of string were inflatable effigies of myself. I don’t know what they were doing – unfortunately, my man chose that moment to wake me up. What can it mean?
Inflatable Prince Charleses! Perhaps the dream was some sort of message from the untapped, subconscious realm of the mind, where things make more sense than can possibly be grasped intellectually. On that basis I’m having a few dozen commissioned – life-size, as in the dream, and kilted; durable but biodegradable material, naturally. Question is, what’s to be done with them? They’ll be there, but what good purpose can they serve? Any thoughts? It all feels like a metaphor for something or other, but I can’t think what.
Fraternally, yours
HRH The Prince of Wales
Jonathon Porritt
Friends of the Earth
26–28 Underwood Street
London
England
8 February 2002
If you’ve had any of the FoE staff working on this inflatable Charleses idea, stand them down! The things have just come in. Looking at them, I think the manufacturers have mistaken me for the late Tony Hancock. They’re going straight in the incinerator.
HRH The Prince of Wales
John Prescott
House of Commons
London
England
12 July 2002
Could I pick your brains for a moment? I’m venturing up to the North to speak at a conference on urban regeneration. Inevitably, there will be Northerners in attendance. I always make a point, as the Sikh community is aware, of greeting those groups who reflect the wonderful diversity of Great Britain in a manner familiar to them, so help me out here. Which of the following are acceptable because I’m sure I’ve imagined at least one of them:
‘A’reet?’
‘Ay up!’
‘Na’ then!’
‘Nobbut!’
‘Cock!’
If you could put ticks and crosses in red pen, please, next to each, it’d make for a splendid ‘aide memoire’.
Yours, ‘ba’tat’
HRH The Prince of Wales
John Prescott
House of Commons
London
England
8 August 2002
Well, Prescott
I read they’re calling you ‘Two Jags’ on account of you owning two cars. I suppose, if a man is to be nicknamed thus, then they should be calling me Prince ‘Three Jeeps, A Mercedes, Two Bentleys, One Private Plane, One Yacht’ Charles. But they don’t, you see. Why is that, I wonder? Why is it funny that you own two Jaguars? Is it because it’s commonly assumed that a fellow who speaks like you should consider himself lucky to own a bicycle? I’m not making fun of you (I know you are sensitive about that), I am sincerely musing on the irony of life.
I enjoy our correspondence. It is good that we can chat like this, as ‘equals’.
Yours, really most sincerely
HRH The Prince of Wales
John Prescott
House of Commons
London
England
19 March 2003
It always dismays me when satirists and politicians lambast you for your occasionally mangled syntax. They forget you have travelled further up the social scale to high office than they themselves and your mistakes are to be expected. May I offer a useful ‘rejoinder’ next time this happens? It’s adapted from the comedy duo Morecambe and Wise in a sketch they did with André Previn, a famous conductor. When they accuse you of talking nonsense, tell them, ‘I’m saying all the right words – but not necessarily in the right order’. I think you’d hear very little from the ‘scoffers’ after this!
Helpfully, yours
HRH The Prince of Wales
John Prescott
House of Commons
>
London
England
20 March 2003
Something that’s always puzzled me about Yorkshiremen – considering their aversion to aitches, a remarkable number of the county’s place-names begin with the letter: Huddersfield, Hebden Bridge, Halifax, Hull, Harrogate, Holbeck, Holmfirth, Heckmondwicke, and many, many more. Were these names by any chance imposed by one’s Norman ancestors, deliberately intended as ‘’umiliating’ to their alphabetically defective Northern inferiors and intended to keep them in their ‘place’ as they tried vainly to pronounce them? Perhaps you could look into the matter.
Yours, inquisitively
HRH The Prince of Wales
David Blunkett
Home Secretary
House of Commons
London
England
16 April 2003
Dear Mr Blunkett
It seems to me that fellows in my position, the ‘haves’, bear a duty to the ‘have nots’ to give something back. In this spirit, I have a large, rusty old septic tank on my grounds. It strikes me that with a bit of elbow grease, application and ‘can do’ spirit, it could be converted into a small-but-handy, inner-city outdoor swimming pool.
Do please have someone send round a few lads from a socially deprived area with time on their hands and a lorry to fetch the thing. It would clear both my conscience and a bit of space on my grounds.