I had two alternatives titles in mind for this short quasi-autobiographical blog. The first was ‘Prince Charles and I’, the second ‘Me and Prince Charles’. The first strikes as a little courtly – as in the Queen’s routine refrain, ‘My husband and I’ – but accords with a pattern of speech I was taught and always understood to be correct; the second reflects the contemporary idiom. It doesn’t matter much of course, but I find it hard to relinquish the first option. Perhaps I’ve been prudent in turning to French.
The point of this reflective piece is to compare two lives, mine and Prince Charles’. I’ll call him Charlie from now on, partly because its less deferential and partly because it seems to fit. I was born on 8 October 1948 and Charlie entered this world on 14 November 1948, so we are almost exact contemporaries. The circumstances of our births differ however. My parents were based in North London and were trying to piece together a life after WW2, which had seen my father’s job – in German shipping – disappear. He was to become a ‘war-trained teacher’ and landed a job in Worthing shortly after my birth. After briefly renting from one of my mother’s aunts, we moved into a council house, where we remained until I was in my mid-teens. My parents were, I guess, respectably middle-class, if to a degree downwardly mobile as a direct consequence of the war. I managed to pass the 11+, attended Worthing High School for Boys and Surrey University, did my Ph.D at London University and eventually secured a permanent academic post, principally at UCL.
As chance would have it, Charlie’s lot was different. He was born at Buckingham Palace. He was initially educated – from 5 to 8 – by a governess, Catherine Peebles, and subsequently attended a variety of schools: Hill House, Cheam Preparatory School and finally, except for two terms at Timbertops in Australia, Gordonstoun in Scotland. He then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, getting a 2.2 and, as is the tradition at Cambridge, picking up an MA for free after collecting the requisite number of coupons from packets of breakfast cereal.
I will not labour the point by detailing his privileges, most absurdly represented by a series of titles, honours, uniforms and row upon row of medals harking back to (Great) Britain’s royal lineage and its imperial past. These are privileges that might sparkle like cheap custom jewels but are far less trivial than they might appear, and I return to them later. The core message is that Charlie was, like me, born of the union of a man and a woman, but, unlike me, was destined to be ‘special’. Let’s say he and I (there I go again) have been asymmetrical or consociates in contradiction.
Of particular and immediate salience for this fragment of my time on Earth are two of Charlie’s privileges. They emanate from class and status (two of Weber’s classic trio). Charlie was born an aristocrat, but one protected via insulation – at considerable public expense – from the ethos and wiles of a dominant and post-aristocratic or bourgeois capitalist regime. He has never had ‘a job’ that would allow him to be allocated to one of the various sociological proxies for class. But, in fact like many surviving aristocrats, for all that Charlie clearly outranks any rivals, he is up to his slightly protruding ears in vast capital accumulation. To labour the contrast in our social positioning, I should add that I’m not.
We might pause here to look at some data. Clarence House is Charlie’s official residence. His primary source of income is generated from the Duchy of Cornwall, which owns 133,658 acres, including farming, residential and commercial properties, as well as an investment portfolio. The Duchy also owns Highgrove House in Gloucestershire, having purchased it for Charlie’s use in 1980 (he rents it for £336,000 pa, and it produced a surplus of £19.1 million back in 2012-13). In 2007 Charlie bought a 192-acre property in Carmarthenshire as a holiday home for Camilla and himself, which he rents out as flats when not in residence. In 2016 it was reported that his estates receive £100,000 pa from the EU in the form of agricultural subsidies. Beginning in 1993 Charlie has been paying tax ‘voluntarily’ under a Memorandum of Understanding (updated in 2013). In 2012, however, HMRC were asked to investigate the Duchy of Cornwall for alleged tax avoidance. The Duchy was mentioned in the Paradise Papers: it was revealed that Duchy invested in a Bermuda-based carbon credits trading company run by one of Charlie’s contemporaries. This was apparently all kept secret. There is – of course – no suggestion that Charlie or the estate avoided UK tax. It should be apparent by now, and in light of previous fragments of my sociological autobiography, that my own levels of wealth and income do not compare with Charlie’s.
So much for class, Charlie’s capital interests are entirely consonant with those of Britain’s capital executive. He is intimately connected to financial capitalism’s class/command dynamic and is a beneficiary of class-based exploitation and command or state-based oppression. His much-heralded if sometimes eccentric excursions into philanthropic and charity work and experimentation are routine ideological sops to the 99% and characteristic components of most capitalist plutocracies.
What about status? Charlie will likely be King one day soon, if after the longest wait in history. The monarchy matters to my mind precisely because its sits at the very core of a rigid hierarchical symbolism celebrating unearned status and all the material, social and cultural rewards that attend it. In the absence of the monarchy, the very notions of a titles, the House of Lords, the honours system and of a landed aristocracy based on inheritance loses what Weber identified as ‘traditional authority’ and subsides. When the monarchy goes, much else is threatened.
Will the monarchy survive the death of Lizzy? Her family is unimpressive, even dysfunctional. Charlie’s credentials, apart from the timing of his birth, are wobbly. He speaks like an eccentric alien, earned little respect from his doomed first marriage, and seems to enjoy spending vast sums of money toying with the application of popular philosophies. Ann keeps her dutiful head down, a bit like her mum. Andrew, alleged sexual proclivities aside, is by all accounts a simple and arrogant sod who makes his siblings look smart by comparison. Edward, well, my invective is running dry. The point of course is that for all my modest birth and accomplishments, and without commending some version of Plato’s ‘philosopher kings’, I would quite likely make a better King than my consociate Charlie, if only: (a) I was an option (which I’m not), and (b) I was willing to be one (which I’m not). How would I have fared as a Prince, and how would Charlie have fared as a just another citizen?
The upshot of all this is that the monarchy is in my view an out-dated institution that does immense damage to our society. It sits at the material and symbolic apex of an increasing iniquitous capitalist system. It shores up the system: it is an obstinate solid in Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid society. We should no longer tolerate the notion that anybody can be born super-rich, while others are born into poverty, hopelessness and despair: born to banquets versus born to foodbanks. Even as it shores up the system, the monarchy sponsors lives of obscene luxury for the very, very few, garnered from it symbolic reach, the profits generated from its huge capital reserves, taxpayer donations and the surplus value arising out of its commercial activities.
It will be apparent that I’m not envious of Charlie. Give me my own life any day. In the meantime I raise my glass – even as I write this – to the advent of a republic.