STEPHEN POLLARD
Letter from London
It
was a beautifully British scene, and one that said almost everything about
the state of a Bri tannia on the verge of reform. Prince Charles, head of the
Church of England, si tting in the congregation at the ul tra-fashionable St.
John's Wood Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London. Santa Palmer–
Tomkinson, the daughter of one of his best friends, had converted to
Judaism in order to marry a scion of one the country's leadingJewish fam–
ilies, Simon Sebag-Montefiore.
For weeks the press had been led to believe that the Prince of Wales
would not be on his own. Just over a year after Diana's death, and after a
carefully constructed campaign designed
to
soften up the public to the idea
of Charles and his mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, as a public item, this
was
to
be their coming-out parade. But days before the wedding, the latest
royal biography had appeared, wi th the apparently sensational revelation
that Diana had made a series of hostile phone calls to Camilla, at one point
even threatening
to
kill her.
The book was widely derided. But its author, Penny Junor, was a long–
standing defender of Charles in the Chuck-and-Di media war. And it soon
emerged that the Palace had seen draft chapters of this supposedly
unofficial-indeed, officially fi·owned-upon-book. In a stroke, much of
the effort to turn Charles from the publicly vilified hate figure-the man
who had driven Diana to attempt suicide-back into a softer father and
man of destiny was undone. The book looked like a murkier part of the
same process, this time through blackening the reputation of the sainted
Di. But the very reason why the wedding had seemed the perfect oppor–
tunity for a public outing-Charles and Camilla had both been invited in
their own right-was now the main cause of embarrassment. One way or
another, both of them would be there. And so the finest minds of the
Palace's protocol department came up wi th a typically British compro–
mise. Charles was to sit on his own, Camilla three rows behind.
Together, but separate-a choreographical representation of the cur–
rent state of the British constitution. The monarchy, the Church of
England, the House of Lords, the electoral system, Scotland, Wales-all in
flux, all changing but all still clinging to their own wreckage.
STEPHEN POLLARD
is a colul1lnist for London's
Tile
Express.
