One’s Voice
‘WHERE Samuel Pepys, Anne Frank and Adrian Mole lead, Prince Charles follows.
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‘To begin my talk on jam, both making and spreading, I’d like to draw upon…’ |
A row over privacy between the Prince and the Mail on Sunday is being debated in the High Court. In a nutshell: the paper wants to print extracts of the Princes diary; Charles doesnt want them to.
But, as the Times reports on its front page, lawyers acting on behalf of the prince have been forced to release the 3,000-word document Charles is said to have written as he flew back from Hong Kong in 1997 after attending the former colonys handover to China.
The Prince called the document The Handover of Hong Kong or The Great Chinese Takeaway.
And it is a good read. Lawyers acting on behalf of the Mail on Sunday say that the Princes words contain evidence of clear political hostility. If so, the public is entitled to read them.
So lets take a look. We quite like this part about Tony Blair and his style of Government: They then take decisions based on market research and focus groups, on the papers produced by political advisers and civil servants none of whom will have ever experienced what it is they are taking decisions about.
Capable or not, these politicos, mandarins and notables travel in style. While jetting back to Blighty in his club class seat, Charles mused: It took me some time to realise that this was not first class(!) although it puzzled me as to why the seat seemed so uncomfortable.
This slight was compounded by the realisation that other dignitaries, including Robin Cook, the former Foreign Secretary, and Paddy Ashdown, then the leader of the Liberal Democrats, were all ensconced in First Class immediately below us. Charles concludes: Such is the end of Empire, I sighed to myself.
This is decent stuff. No wonder the begonias are all ears when Charles in delivering one of his famous oratories.
Although, if the Prince of Wales does see himself as a ‘dissident’ working against prevailing political consensus, as Mark Bolland, his former deputy private secretary, has claimed, perhaps he should not dampen things down but spice them up?
The Princes views on reincarnation (he wants to return as a tampon), the South Bank arts complex (a carbuncle) and the Chinese leaders (waxworks) are not exactly the stuff of political intrigue.
They are more the stuff of an increasingly marginalised figure, who, deprived of an audience of plants, talks to himself via a diary…’
Posted: 23rd, February 2006 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
