Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and fine consort to our noble Queen, long to reign over us, popped round to see us yesterday. 

I mean, he didn’t drop in to my place for a cuppa and a chat, but he did go to our local hospital, the Luton and Dunstable, and open a new cardiac care unit there. Which was kind of him: I’m sure we need one. Not, you understand, that he paid for it himself or anything, but it’s the thought that counts, not what you spend.

He has a bit of a reputation for his little quips, and he did tell a Filipino nurse that her country must be half empty, as her compatriots were all over in Britain running the NHS for us, but that got him a smile and no-one seems to have been offended. Getting up someone’s nose wouldn't have been at all unusual: for instance, he told a bunch of British students in China that if they stayed too long they’d end up ‘slitty-eyed’, or commented on some lousy electrical work that it must have been done ‘by an Indian.’

Prince Philip chewing the fat with a Filipino nurse at the Luton and Dunstable
... and, miracle, not getting on anyone's nerves

The official comment yesterday was that hardy perennial of all royal visits: it provided a great boost to morale. Naturally, I’ve nothing against that: today’s economic woes rather tend to undermine morale, so anything that builds it back up is to be applauded. It just worries me that we get such a kick from something as banal as a visit by someone whose most striking achievement was getting born in the right place.

OK, in his case, he followed that one up by making an expedient marriage. Because he was born into a family justly celebrated for having done little of value for generations, and married into another, it only takes him to show up somewhere for us all to feel better. It may just be me, but that sounds basically nuts.

These issues have had a little more ventilation than usual this week thanks to comments by Hilary Mantel. They came from a thoughtful and thought-provoking speech, as one might expect from a talented novelist, well worth reading in full here. However, it contained a few uncomplimentary sentences about a woman I persist in thinking of as ‘Kate Middleton’, though I’m told she ought now to be referred to as ‘Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.’ Sorry, Kate, too much of a mouthful.

Now this is a blog and I try to keep the posts short, but I’m nonetheless going to quote a little more of Mantel’s address than the papers have tended to reproduce. Mantel was talking about Marie-Antoinette, the unfortunate Queen of France, who:

…as a royal consort was a gliding, smiling disaster, much like Diana in another time and another country. But Kate Middleton, as she was, appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished. When it was announced that Diana was to join the royal family, the Duke of Edinburgh is said to have given her his approval because she would ‘breed in some height’. Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners. She looks like a nicely brought up young lady, with ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ part of her vocabulary. But in her first official portrait by Paul Emsley, unveiled in January, her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off. One critic said perceptively that she appeared ‘weary of being looked at’.

Unsurprisingly the papers who sprang to her defence, supported by that intellectual heavyweight David Cameron, have fixated on the remarks about Kate’s plastic smile and design by committee. But it’s much more telling that Mantel focuses on our strange view of royal women, viewing them as people whose main purpose is to be looked at; I love the suggestion that Kate ought to be telling some of the spectators to bugger off. That sounds like a call to Kate to stand up for herself, to assert her personality and to stick a finger up to the whole complex of image and flummery and obsequiousness which, by her marriage, she sadly joined.

If Mantel criticises Kate, it’s principally for being the accomplice or the dupe – possibly both: a willing dupe – of a thoroughly unhealthy set of social relations which it would be an immense emancipation to reject. We suffer so much indignity, and indeed privation, for the belief that there are some who, by birth, marriage of simple naked wealth, particularly deserve our deference. Mitt Romney ran a whole presidential campaign on that premise, and what a relief it was that he went down to defeat.

Mantel does us all a great service by drawing our attention to the problem. Even poor benighted Kate with her permanent smile could benefit.

Royal Indifference

On 31 August 1997, we were staying at my mother-in-law’s house in a little village in upper Alsace, France. 

I stress ‘France’ because of the widespread confusion over whether Alsace is in Germany, a confusion the Germans spectacularly shared on three occasions between 1870 and 1945.

Friends of ours from England were staying in a hotel nearby and joined us for breakfast. Their first words as they came in were ‘do you know about Princess Di?’

We hadn’t heard about her death in a car crash that morning.

In a matter of instants I travelled from incredulity to grief. And that grief led me straight back to incredulity. Why on earth was I so upset?

After all, not a week earlier we had been royally dismissing her highness. She’d been on holiday in a seaside villa where she had complained vociferously about being photographed from boats on the bay and had then chosen to sunbathe on the roof of the house, in about as perfect a position for the photographers as any imaginable.

It seemed an odd way to avoid publicity.

And yet I mourned her death. As did most of my countrymen, though some went a lot further in their grief than I was prepared to follow them.

I never went down to St James’s House to lay flowers. I really couldn’t work up any enthusiasm over whether the Queen had flown a flag at half mast or not. I couldn’t get passionate about Tony Blair’s intense reaction to the event, which I assumed had owed a great deal to perceived electoral advantage anyway.

A sea of flowers in the ocean of grief for Diana's death

Even so, I'd joined many of my countrymen on the roller-coaster ride from disdain to despair, by which we had illustrated, as if illustration were needed, that the opposite of love isn’t hatred but indifference. Clearly, though I had thought myself indifferent to the royal family (a bunch of polo-playing jet setters: how could they possibly speak for me?), I had been less indifferent than I hoped. 

I was apparently caught up in that bizarre love-hate affair between the British people and the royal family that shows no sign of dying down to this day. The Queen’s Jubilee, her cameo performance at the Olympic opening ceremony, stoked the love; but it takes only the slightest provocation to bring out all the worst in prurient spite again, as we’ve seen in the publication of the nude pictures of Prince Harry and now the topless photos of Kate, Duchess of Cambridge.

Ironic that we should have a row over Kate’s breasts just days after the relaunch of the campaign to stop the Sun newspaper’s topless page 3 girls.

I seem to have made a little progress since 1997. Had they not been reproduced in a mass-circulation tabloid on sale on every street corner, I would have seen none of the photos of Harry; at least, I didn’t go looking for any.

Similarly, it was a relief to discover that I not only avoided googling Kate’s breasts, I didn’t even have to resist a temptation to do so. I found it more interesting to read about the murder of the US ambassador in Libya which struck me as potentially more significant in our lives. After all, the Kate business had generated vitriol, but Libya produces oil.

Perhaps I’m learning a little of the indifference I was lacking before. It would be a comfort to know that the nation was doing the same, and for two reasons.

First, because this swinging backwards and forwards between adulation and contempt can’t be doing any of us any good.

Second, if we’re ever going to solve some of the problems that beset society, we need to unlearn our cult of deference towards those who claim the prerogative to be considered our betters. Then we’ll be able to learn how to insist on the right to make our own destiny.

It will be a measure of our success that we stop ogling the royals and buying the papers that feed us all the titbits (and the pun’s deliberate). That will mean mastering our thirst for publicity about them. 

Taking their statements at face value, that ought to please the royals. However, I wonder how happy they would really be at the prospect of drifting out of the public eye.

But by then, in our blessed indifference, why would any of us care what they thought?

Kate and Di may be beyond our aspirations, and some of us know it

Train travel continues to enthral me with the vignettes of English life it provides.

Yesterday I shared a table with a young man and woman who kept up a lively conversation all the way into London. Not a couple, just colleagues and friends travelling on the same train.

She wasn’t looking forward to the day, because she was going to be working with a group women she simply couldn’t bear.

‘We’re all such a different class,’ she announced, ‘they’re really nice but there’s this one that goes out on a different date each night. So she just sits there talking about her dates, with her fake tan and her impossibly high heels, and in a voice you can hear across the whole office. She’s nice but she’s really not my cup of tea.’

The picture forming in my mind was one of the classic ‘Essex girl’. In case you don’t know that image, let me just say that the answer to the question ‘how does an Essex girl turn on the light after sex?’ is ‘she pushes open the car door.’ This is, I’m sure, an unworthy calumny on the fine old county of Essex and the tens of thousands of irreproachable women from there, a slur promoted no doubt by the surrounding counties who’d like to pretend that they are strangers to anything remotely like sluttishness.

Meanwhile, there was more to come about the tiresome colleague.

‘I don’t think she gets it. I mean it’s her first job, working with us as an intern... I mean she’s just out of university...’

My ears pricked up. A degree? Essex girl has many fine assets but educational attainment isn’t generally one of them.

‘I mean, good on her, I think she’ll make it because she’s the right social class.’

Really? This didn't sound like the snobbery I was expecting.

‘I’ve never talked to her but I know a lot about her,’ she went on.

‘You’ve had to listen enough,’ commiserated her companion.

‘Exactly. She had fourteen people to dinner the other day and she takes a taxi to work. I’ll bet she doesn’t live in some little flat share with people she doesn’t know, I bet it’s her own, which her parents bought her.’

And there we have it. Not a cheap but cheeky Essex girl at all. More like a Sloane Ranger.

You don’t know what a Sloaney is? The name is derived from their tendency to congregate around London’s glorious Sloane Square and the elegant districts of Kensington and Chelsea nearby.

What’s the first thing a Sloaney makes when she’s laying on dinner for her friends? A call to a caterer.

Sloaneys also have their own special way with English vowels, so a ‘Kensington crèche’ is not a fashionable place to leave the children, it’s what leads to a dent on the Range Rover when the nanny’s taking them to school.

Now the young lady being complained of probably isn’t quite a Sloaney, the social category made famous by Princess Di in the eighties and revived recently by our new Princess Kate. No true Sloaney would have a fake tan – it would all be genuine, from St Moritz in the winter and somewhere exclusive in the Caribbean in the summer. But obviously the woman being complained of was somewhat closer to those exalted circles than the one complaining.

Sloaneys present and past: Kate and Di

So I’d got it exactly wrong. The problem was class, certainly, but the speaker regarded herself not as superior to the other woman but as her social inferior.

Instructive, I thought. It seems to me that the dividing linees between classes are sharpening  in England at the moment, and the recent street disturbances shows how they can explosively transform into battle lines. And that conversation in the train showed how heavily they weigh on our general consciousness.

Between the two friends there had been that cordiality and ease that the French sum up so eloquently as ‘complicity’. Their gender difference wasn’t a problem. Nor was racial difference: he was white and she, while her command of the language showed her to be entirely English, belonged to the group that we lazily refer to as ‘Indian’. Which suggests that a religious distinction also separated them, but seemed to affect them no more than the others.

So is that the nature of the moment we’re going through? Gender, racial and cultural differences are fading in importance in comparison to that age-old bitterness we call class division?

Sounds like a simplification. Though not one that will make our lives any easier.