“The Petulant Prince” or “The Cantankerous King”
It sounds as if it ought to be the title
to one of the fairy stories that Oscar wrote, a seemingly simple tale, told
directly and simply with a poignantly heart-warming moral at the end.
But this is what is laughingly called real life and though it has a ‘real’ prince, he is not the handsome ingenue all golden curls and peachy skin, no, this is an ageing man who has endured decades of being on the side-lines and now can almost feel the impress of the coronation crown on his head. He’s well past retirement age and the passions that filled his heir apparent youth, middle age, and early old age, must now be supressed for the greater good of maintaining the position of ‘The Firm’ in the public imagination.
The image of ‘The Firm’ (a term coined by a man who often unsettled the fantasy of the importance of the Royal Family himself) is a delicate balancing act to maintain, and there have had to have been a certain amount of dynastic acrobatics to keep ‘The Firm’ alive and well.
Although The Queen has played her role almost to perfection, in her studied probity, determined neutrality, and political vacuousness, the same cannot be said for her children and other members of the wider family. Scandal, corruption, speaking out of turn, crassness, divorce, fire, and death – the back story of King Charles III is well worthy of a much saltier series than the reverential TV saga presently working its way towards the present.
The Transition is a delicate time for any organization, but much more so for an institution that defies reason, logic, and democracy, and really needs the political and social version of smoke and mirrors to justify its existence.
And what has our Petulant Prince (aka The Cantankerous King) done to ease the transition from QEII to CIII? Apart from making his every public utterance sound as if he is auditioning for the Boris Karloff role in something like The Sombre Crypt, he has shown all too clearly his pettiness.
The YouTube films doing the rounds are concerned with pens, and the intolerable pressures that such writing implements put on our new monarch.
The first bout of pen pressure came during the televised signing of the proclamation of his new position. The proclamation was on a large sheet of vellum (?) and Charles found that the inkwells were in the way and grimaced and imperiously tried to wave the thing away with regal hand flips while saying “I can’t be expected to move the thing!” No indeed, moving a small piece of desk furniture is obviously a no-no for a man who has servants to iron shoelaces flat and put toothpaste on his toothbrush!
The signing of the visitors’ book in Northern Ireland was even worse when, having first written down the wrong date, he discovered that his pen was leaking. He did a mini-rampage and swore, “bloody thing!”
This would all be quite amusing, if such entitled petulance was not from a man who had just been made head of state. If he finds it difficult to cope with a misplaced inkwell and a leaking pen, it really doesn’t say very much for his future ability to cope with issues that might be of a little more moment!
But if you could laugh at his various hissy fits over ink and the way it is applied to surfaces (including his fingers) there is nothing funny about the story that, while a thanksgiving service for the Queen was in progress in St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, warnings of redundancy notices were issued to staff working for the former Prince Charles in Clarence House.
While the move from being ‘Prince’ Charles and the heir to the throne, to being King Charles III would of necessity entail some movement – physically from Clarence House to Buckingham Palace, and administratively from Prince to King – the optics of telling staff, some of whom had worked for the Prince for decades, that their jobs were on the line while a commemorative service for the Queen was happening and before she had even been buried, was bad to say the least. Or crass. Or unfeeling. Or even, un-kingly.
Some people have been quick to defend the king and make the point that his mother had just died, and he found himself under great stress, no matter how long he had waited for the moment and how many plans had been made for a smooth transition.
And that is the point, plans have been made for years, every detail has been considered and planned for. The movement of staff, or their replacement, or amalgamation or whatever must have been planned for, long in advance, so why the hugger-mugger inept and insensitive speed with which to tell long serving employees that they were going to be sacked.
It remains that the public face of the king is now seen as a that of a petty old man, who demands everything be ‘just so’ and is enraged when it isn’t. He could, of course, have turned any slight inconvenience into something of a joke and passed-off the moment with deft insouciance. But he didn’t. Because he isn’t that sort of man. And, slight though the ink-related issues might be, the staffing inconsideration is much more worrying.
I think that Charles starts his reign with an overarching sense of, “it could have been done differently.”
Perhaps that might just sum him up.
