Johann Hari

Can you feel the election fever yet? Me neither. Britain seems to be stricken instead with election swine flu. A few of us are sweating and vomiting – Brown and Cameron, mainly – while everyone else is refusing to touch infected election-surfaces and hoping it will pass us over.

There are days when this screw-them-all sourness seems apt. In this final dissolute week before parliament is dissolved, the main parties have come together to push through two changes to the law that will harm Britain – and they have done it while putting on their serious, superior statesman-faces. One is a huge gift to Britain's armed criminal gangs; and the other deliberately exempts one reactionary super-rich family from basic democratic checks.

Almost everything you have heard about the drug "Meow-Meow" is fake – including its name. Here's the reality. Since late 2007, some young people have been using a party drug called mephedrone, which you can snort or wrap in rolling-paper and swallow. It gives you a quick euphoric ecstasy-style high, and then passes from your system. It's become pretty popular, with 33 per cent of clubbers using it, according to a study for Mixmag magazine.

This is part of a very old story: in every phase of our existence, in every culture, human beings have sought out different ways to get off our faces. In his book The Chemical Muse, Dr D C A Hillman documents how the ancient philosophers who formed the basis of Western thought were getting mashed up all the time – including when they wrote their classics. The urge for chemical intoxication is very deep – and has at some point driven everyone from Barack Obama to David Cameron.

Yet you have been told that this drug is a new and unique menace. It has killed 27 people in Britain, makes teenagers try to "rip off their scrotum", and a ban will stop the harm it causes. Each of these claims is false.

The first mephedrone death was reported last November, when a 14-year-old girl called Gabrielle Price died in Brighton after apparently taking the drug. Immediately, there were calls for a ban. Three weeks later, the autopsy found the drug had nothing to do with her death: she was killed by "broncho-pneumonia which resulted from a streptococcal A infection". But the campaign didn't pause. They were now identifying deaths from mephedrone everywhere – mainly among clubbers who had taken a huge cocktail of different drugs washed down with alcohol. In truth, one death has been found to be caused by the drug. That's one. This makes jmephedrone somewhat less dangerous than peanuts, which kill 10 people a year by causing an allergic reaction.

What about the drug's other effects? The excellent New Scientist magazine tracked down the origins of The Sun's claim that it made a teenager "try to rip off his testicles", which rapidly became an established fact in news reports. They discovered it was based on a claim that circulated on internet chatrooms, and had been written as a joke. The drug isn't even called "Meow-Meow" by anyone: that term was randomly inserted into Wikipedia just before the hysteria broke, and picked up by journalists.

Of course mephedrone could turn out to have dangerous long-term effects we haven't picked up on yet. That's true of all new medicines too, from SSRIs to new breast cancer drugs. But let's assume – for the sake of argument, in the face of the evidence – that the worst fears are true, and this drug will cause long-term harm. The people demanding a ban act as if there's a simple equation here: it causes damage, so ban it and the damage will stop. But the evidence shows this is not how prohibition works. In practice it doesn't stop people using the drug – but it does add a whole new tsunami of harm on top.

Let's start with an easy parallel. Alcohol currently causes the death of 40,000 people a year – which is around 39,999 more than mephedrone. Like most Brits, I know people who have been broken by booze, and never came back. If harm is reason enough for a ban, the case is a slam-dunk for criminalising alcohol. But we don't. Why? Because we have a mature understanding – based on history – that when you criminalise a hugely popular recreational drug, people don't stop buying it and selling it. No: all that happens is that the market is taken over by armed criminal gangs, who sell a stronger and more adulterated version of the drug, and kill to control their patch.

So what will happen in a fortnight when the ban comes into effect? It'll still be on sale to anyone who wants it. We can't even keep drugs out of our prisons, where we have an armed, guarded perimeter: Policy Exchange just found 85 per cent of prisoners can get any drug they want. Use won't fall: ketamine was criminalised in 2006, and the same number of people use it every weekend now, according to the British Crime Survey. (Indeed, it may even increase. Portugal had a higher level of drug use – especially among the young – before 2001, when it decriminalised personal possession of all drugs.)

But what will certainly happen is an early Christmas for criminal gangs. They are about to be handed a big new market – and they will buy a lot of guns to protect it. In Guernsey they criminalised mephedrone last year, and gangsters there – who find it hard to get guns – have been guarding their mephedrone patches with samurai swords. It's the logic of prohibition, in shiny silver.

And all for what? So a few right-wing newspapers and a few politicians – Labour and Conservative – can pose as Tough on Crime, while unleashing a wave of Real Armed Crime. In the name of safety from our own natural impulses, they will make us all less safe on our streets.

The same cross-party cabal is also rushing before the election to enact another pernicious legal change. There is only one group of people anywhere in Britain who are automatically placed above and beyond the Freedom of Information Act, so you and I have no right to know how they are affecting policy. They are determined by birth. Their surname is Windsor. But concerned citizens have nonetheless been able to get some information about these people, to whom we pay tens of millions a year, by requesting to see the exchanges between Charles Windsor and ministers.

This is how we know he has been demanding NHS funds be used for junk science like homeopathy, trying to cancel building projects he personally finds ugly, and trying to thwart real and potentially life-saving science like nanotechnology research.

Now ministers are moving to hide these demands from the public forever by changing the law to make even these communications permanently secret. How will he act behind an even stronger veil of secrecy? Former ministers like Nicholas Ridley have described how Windsor would "scream" at him and "throw" papers if he – an elected politician – didn't accept his royal demands. Soon, we will be even less likely to find out about this abuse of democracy.

When the main parties band together to pursue such foolish policies, it's easy to turn off (and reach for the mephedrone). But there's another way. There are terrific groups campaigning against these policies – and virtually every bad policy out there. On drugs, the Transform Drug Policy Foundation campaigns for a sane strategy of taking drugs back from the armed gangs and legally regulating them. On the Windsor family, Republic campaigns for Britain to finally select our head of state by voting lines, not blood-lines.

So before the nausea-inducing election begins, it's worth stopping for a second, and remembering this is how most political change happens. Not primarily by choosing between parties bunched in the middle, but by ordinary citizens banding together by setting up or joining or volunteering for groups like this, and demanding better policies, even if it takes decades for them to finally be accepted in Westminster.

If this election feels like a bout of swine flu, remember there's a batch of Tamiflu waiting on the shelf – becoming a diligent, committed campaigner for political sanity yourself, all year round.

...here.

The trailer is here: here. If anyone puts it on YouTube let me know...

It must be exhausting to be a monarchist, forever finding ways to pretend a family of cold, talentless snobs are better than the rest of us. They have to make gold out of mud. The system of monarchy – selecting a head of state solely because of the womb they passed through, and surrounding them with sycophants from the moment they emerge – produces warped and dim people, and demands we scrape before them. What’s a poor monarchist to do? They can only lavish a thick cream of adjectives – ‘dignity’, ‘charm’, ‘majesty’ – over the Windsor family in the hope that some of us are fooled.

This process corrupts even the most intelligent monarchists. A strange case study is the new authorized thousand-plus-page biography of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (the ‘Queen Mother’) by William Shawcross. He is a smart man: his study of the secret bombing of Cambodia by Henry Kissinger is extraordinary. Yet as a monarchist he has an impossible task. He has to present a cruel, bigoted snob who fleeced millions from the British tax-payer as a heroine fit to rule over us. His mind turns to mush. Before the real Bowes-Lyon is lost in a frenzy of royalist rimming, we should remember who she really was: more Imelda Marcos than the good fairy Glinda.

By the time she died, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was treating the British Treasury – our tax-money – as her personal piggy bank, with her bills running way beyond the millions she was allotted every year. Even the ultra-Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont complained that “she far exceeds her Civil List and the Treasury gets very het up about it.” She used the money to pay for eighty-three full-time staff, including four footmen, two pages, three chauffeurs (what do they do, split her into three parts for transportation?), a private secretary, an orderly, a housekeeper, five housemaids… the list goes on and on. She even insisted that it was a legitimate use of public funds to maintain a full-time ‘Ascot office’, whose job is to do nothing but keep a register of members of the Royal Enclosure and send them entry vouchers.

She presented this spending – enough to open and run a new hospital that would save thousands of lives every year – as an act of selfless patriotism. Michael Mann, the former Dean of Windsor who knew her very well, explained: “She feels that Britain is Great Britain and that, therefore, ours must be no banana court. To lower standards [i.e., her spending on champagne, caviar and limos] is to denigrate the country and, insofar as high standards require big spending, so be it.” When single mothers take 0.1 percent of this sum from the state, the same newspapers that laud Elizabeth as “the best of British” savage them as “scroungers.” If they refused to pay tax – as Elizabeth did – they would have been put in prison.

What did she do to earn these vast sums? Her parents were ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’ Strathmore, and from birth she was waited on by a gaggle of servants including a butler, two footmen, five housemaids, a cook and numerous room maids. She grew up with four palaces at her disposal – but it wasn’t enough. She was obsessed with “bloodlines”, which she believed determined a person’s worth, and wanted to marry into what she regarded as “the best” – the Windsor family.

At first she tried to woo Edward Windsor, but when he wasn’t interested, she settled for his stammering, highly strung younger brother, George. When Edward became King, she plotted to force his abdication so George could ascend and she could become ‘Queen’. His “crime” was to fall in love with a divorcee – and one with such poor bloodlines! Once Edward was successfully toppled, Elizabeth insisted he and his wife Wallace be driven into exile and blanked by royal circles. (The couple had plenty of real flaws, but Elizabeth was blind to them: it was the American-ness and the ambition and the divorce that she loathed.)

This was her way with any relatives who displeased her by showing vulnerability. When her cousins became mentally ill, they were locked in asylums and never seen again. Elizabeth’s entry in Who’s Who falsely announced they were dead. This icy ruthlessness startled people who met her. In 1939, French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier said she was “an excessively ambitious young woman who would be ready to sacrifice every other country in the world so that she might remain Queen.”

The most striking aspect to Shawcross’ biography is that once she had contrived to marry, Elizabeth really didn’t do anything else for the rest of her life except spend, spend, spend – our money. He has to pad out whole decades. She didn’t even raise her own children: she would see them for an hour a day, and get them to chant: “We are not supposed to be normal. We are not supposed to be normal.”

But to be fair, she did do one more thing. In her spare time, she supported far right politics. She was a passionate defender of appeasing Adolf Hitler, lobbying behind the scenes to garner support for Neville Chamberlain. The reasons are plain: even fifty years later, she bragged to Woodrow Wyatt that she had “reservations about Jews.” Once the war began, she was rebranded as a symbol of Britain’s heroic resistance to the Nazis – but what did she actually do? Unlike everyone else, she didn’t live on rations, but was fattened by pheasants and venison on the royal estates. She didn’t stay in bombed-out London anything like as much as the myth suggests: she spent much of the war in Windsor, Norfolk and Scotland, far from the Nazi planes, surrounded by battalions of servants.

Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon kept up her support for far-right politics throughout her life. She did everything she could to bolster the torturing white minority tyrannies in Rhodesia and South Africa, because – as the journalist Paul Callan, who knew her, put it – “She is not fond of black folk.” Our beaming Queen Mum was Alf Garnett in a tiara.

She believed Britain’s class system reflected a natural hierarchy – and the people below her creamy upper tier were inferior. She told Woodrow Wyatt, “I hate that classlessness. It is so unreal.” At first, she was appalled by the idea of her eldest daughter marrying Phillip Mountbatten, because his “bloodlines” weren’t good enough: his family had fallen from power, so they weren’t “really” royal. When Diana Spencer started hugging AIDS victims and lepers, Elizabeth was disgusted. When Diana started rebelling, Elizabeth announced to friends the girl was “schizophrenic”, but she was bemused because Diana came from “a good family.” The rest of us, by implication, come from “bad families”, where you would expect schizophrenia and other lower-class disorders.

The defenders of Elizabeth were left claiming that her drunken inactivity was itself an achievement. W.F. Deedes, the late Telegraph columnist, claimed that “in an increasingly earnest world, she teaches us all how to have fun, that life should not be all about learning, earning and resting. In a world where we have all become workaholics, there she is…grinning at racehorses. Bless her heart.” He was in favour of the dole after all – provided it was worth three million pounds, and went to one single aristocrat.

William Shawcross has won the favour of his fellow monarchists by taking this curdled life and presenting it as the best of British. It’s the single most unpatriotic claim I’ve ever heard. If you don’t think Britain can do better – far better – than this nasty leech and her stunted family, then you don’t deserve to live in this Sceptred Isle.

To read more of my articles about the monarchy, click here.

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So the British people are going to get a President after all. He will "speak for the nation and to the nation". He will rule over us with his "knowledge and contacts and unique ability." How do we know? Because Charles Windsor has just announced – via his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby – that he is seizing the role for himself, without an election. Explicitly citing the Presidencies of Ireland and Germany, Dimbleby says Charles intends to be a "political" King. It will be "a seismic shift in the role of the sovereign," he says, with "the potential to be politically and constitutionally explosive."

Sing it, sister. This is the best news we Republicans have had for years – and finally throws up a vision of how the rusty British monarchy will fall.

Charles says the "responsibility and authority of his position" – and the "wisdom" it entails – requires him to "speak out" and "pressure" our elected representatives. A bevy of fawning pundits have responded by crying – yes! Speak for us, oh sovereign! We commoners cannot produce one as wise as you! So I have to start with a point so obvious that it seems odd even to state it in 2008.

Charles's position stems from one thing and one thing only: he emerged from Elizabeth Windsor's womb 60 years ago. That's it. He has no "responsibility." He has no legitimate "authority." He has no more right to "speak for the nation and to the nation" – and pocket £7m a year for the bother – than you, me, or the next person you see at the bus stop.

If not for that fortuitous journey through a royal womb, Charles Windsor's "wise" arguments would be gathering dust in the reject bin at certain newspapers' letters pages. If his advocates didn't keep praising him as "a public intellectual" I wouldn't be rude enough to point it out, but Charles Windsor is a strikingly stupid man. Every time he has been put into a competitive situation where he is judged according to objective criteria, he has been a disaster.

Despite the most expensive education money can buy, he managed only to scrape a B and a C in his A-Levels. Despite this, he was admitted to Cambridge University, where he failed again, barely scraping a 2:2. When he was ushered into the Navy, he was so inept at navigation he kept crashing. Anybody else would have been court-martialled, but instead the Navy gave him one-on-one tuition for years. And still he failed.

And what of his arguments? They are garbled, uninformed, cliché-ridden repetitions of what the last person who spoke to him said. His very sympathetic biographer Dimbleby admits that his staff "were uncomfortable with his tendency to reach instant conclusions on the basis of insufficient thought". Edward Adeane, Charles' private secretary for many years, was disturbed by the fact that "Charles was extraordinarily easy to lead by the nose".

What do these "interventions" really consist of? Charles Windsor scorns modern science, attacking it for its "lack of soul" and for "playing God". So he uses his position to attack qualified life-saving professionals who earned their position, like the General Medical Council – and says he knows better.

He demands that the NHS pay for "spiritual, alternative medicine", and has been a key player in ensuring the NHS now spends £200m a year on it. But as Professor Richard Dawkins explains, there is no such thing as "alternative" medicine. If a treatment works in clinical trials, it ceases to be "alternative": it is classified as medicine and prescribed by doctors. So "alternative medicine" is – by definition – medicine that doesn't work in clinical trials. It is not medicine at all.

Charles's other arguments have just as much merit. Even on the (rare) occasions when he is right, Charles wrecks it with rancid hypocrisy. His claims to be opposed to global warming would be more persuasive if he were not one of the worst personal polluters in Britain, using a private jet for the most trivial of trips. His claims to be concerned for the poor would be more persuasive if he did not claim more than £300m of public land that should be used to pay for schools and hospitals to fund his own shocking decadence.

But even if Charles Windsor was a genius who represented a political agenda I totally agreed with, I would still oppose his "right" to be an unelected Head of State. In a democracy, power should stem from voting lines, not blood-lines. Yet Charles has shown a willingness to use his unearned position to bully elected representatives for decades now. One former minister, Peter Morrison, has recounted how Charles called him into Kensington Palace and screamed and shouted and banged his fist on the table when Morrison wouldn't accept his arguments about the national curriculum.

It's easy to assume that as monarch Charles would have no powers – but it's untrue. The monarch gets an hour of face-time with the Prime Minister every week, has access to all government papers, and – in a tie-break election – gets to pick the Prime Minister. This isn't a fantasy-scenario: it happened as recently as 1974, and it will happen again.

To be fair, we should blame ourselves as much as Charles. Monarchy inevitably warps the personality of the people at its heart, because from childhood they hear nothing but sycophancy. One of Charles' ex-girlfriends said: "He lives in an isolation ward of flattery. He goes to Hollywood and is told he's handsome. He swaps jokes with a comic genius like Peter Sellers, and they fall down laughing. He boffs a woman once, and she tells him he's the greatest lover she's ever had." It is this system that made this dim-witted mediocrity believe he has a womb-given right to be our President. We made it. We created the monster.

So what happens when this man accedes to the throne and pretends to be our President? In Spain, Sophia Frederica, the "Queen", has begun to speak out – and support for the monarchy has withered.

So let Charles speak. Let him grab the reins of power. Let him spew his ignorant babble from his many golden palaces. Charles Windsor will – in an unprecedented moment of efficiency – lead us at last into the Republic of Great Britain.

POSTSCRIPT: Richard Dawkins has commented on this article. Check it out - I agree with every word.

Even today, ten years after the death of its star, the snuff soap opera of Charles-Diana-Camilla rolls on. The latest plot developments still rivvet the front pages: we all know that with Diana crashing out of the picture exactly a decade ago, triggering a floral revolution on the streets of London, Camilla could finally marry her man. It seemed like the warm-hearted wind-down for a Jilly Cooper novel, a happy-ever-after for the Ugly Sister. Until this week, that is, when it became clear that Diana's footsteps really do - as Elton John's cheese-anthem put it - still fall here on England's greenest hills, at least as far as her own memorial service in Westminster Abbey goes. Camilla has been banished from the ceremony memorialising her Nemesis, and she has huffed off to a Mediterranean exile-holiday.

But this story is not just a personal drama. Beneath the soap suds, it is a parable about the extraordinary cruelty of the institution of monarchy in a 24/7 media market - and how monarchists, by perpetuating the institution, are torturing the Windsor family they claim to love.

Let's look at how the institution of monarchy wrecked the lives of these three protagonists - and will inevitably do the same to their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, until the golden misery-go-round is finally stopped.

Diana Spencer was always going to be damaged by her hideous childhood, where she was abandoned by her mother. But there is an agreement among her biographers that her most disfunctional behaviour - the bulimia, the self-harm, the suicide attempts - only began after she was sucked into the monarchy machine. Her former flatmate explains: “She went to live at Buckingham Palace,” she explains, “and then the tears started. The little thing got so thin…She wasn’t happy, she was suddenly plunged into all this pressure and it was a nightmare for her.”

No 19 year-old could cope with suddenly having every inch of her body - from her hair to her hymen - thrown open to public discussion, with her phones tapped and her body papped in an endless churn. Her family could see from the very beginning that it was leading to disaster: her mother issued a public statement during the engagement asking “whether, in the public execution of their jobs, [journalists] consider it necessary or fair to harass my daughter daily, from dawn until well after dark?” It was a prophetic question. Less than two decades later, her daughter ended up speeding at more than 100mph through the streets of Paris to flee vulpine photographers, and died there, still being photographed a hundred times as she haemorraghed to death. Today, the family of Kate Middleton issue word-for-word the same warnings.

When he retired as Palace Press Spokesman in 1967, the famously reactionary Commander Colville publicly expressed his fears about the lives of the Windsors being “progressively more exposed to public scrutiny,” and he said it was necessary to draw a line between “what may be properly termed as ‘in the public interest’ and what is private.” But today, the monarchy is a rolling media roadshow, selling only itself. The kind of harrassment that wrecked Diana's life and eventually ended will persist as long as monarchy continues to exist.

It was not only the media flesh-tearing that ruined Diana's life, though. It was also the fact that the institution of monarchy had warped and deformed the personality of her husband so severely that he was incapable of giving her love and support. All of us learn our social skills from a process of trial-and-error. We do something people like, and they reward us with laughter or praise or love. We do something people don't like, and they tell us we're a fool, or wander off and talk to somebody else. But royal children never experience this. No matter what they do, people tell them they're wonderful. A friend of Charles told Nigel Dempster that “he lives in an isolation ward of flattery. He goes to Hollywood and is told he’s handsome. He swaps jokes with a comic genius like Peter Sellers and the other Goons, and they fall down laughing. He boffs a woman once, and she tells him he’s the greatest lover she’s ever had… The best education in the world can’t defend you against sycophancy on that scale.”

A man subject to such cruel adoration could never have a healthy and reciprocal relationship. But - to make it worse still - the monarchists forced him to choose an especially inappropriate bride. As Steven Barry, his former valet and friend puts it, “the women the Prince liked best…they were the ones who had experienced most.” Yet the monarchists demanded a virgin, so he could not choose the woman he really loved, Camilla. Charles' uncle, Lord Mountbatten, told Charles that falling in love was a luxury which a monarch could not afford. So he was trapped, doomed to ruin his life and his wife's, while trying desperately to carry on an affair, thereby ruining Camilla's happiness for thirty years as well.

This will keep on happening. Members of the Windsor family will always be mis-shapen by life-long sycophancy, driven half-mad by cameras stalking them every moment, and live horrible lives. A palace is little compensation for losing your privacy, your freedom, and your personality. True, the mocrahy does not seem to be on the verge of collapse. Eepublicanism has not caught on as it seemed it might in the flower-scented anger on the Mall a decade ago. But Diana week showed us how tenuous our attachment to the Windsors is. We accept monarchy partly because of affection for Elizabeth Windsor, who will not live forever (wait until you see Charles as King) and partly because we have not absorbed an important new republican argument. Far from hating the Windsor family, we republicans are the ones who want to set them free to live happy, normal lives in the Republic of Britain. It is the monarchists who want to carry on poking them with a golden stick so we can see their miserable little dance.

As we remember Diana, we must remember the real lesson of her life: in the twenty-first century, monarchy is a savage institution that should have died with her.

You can read more of my articles about the British monarchy, and why it should be abolished, here.

If you support this cause, the best group to join is the excellent Republic, which you can find here.

It is a decade now since London - the loudest, most caffeine-drenched city on earth - fell silent, for a moment. I remember standing in the centre of Hyde Park on that Saturday afternoon in September, watching the funeral service for Diana Spencer with a few friends and a few million massed mourners. In the one-minute silence, nothing moved, apart from the rustle of the mile-long river of flowers piled up outside the Palace.

Today, we look back on Diana week like clubbers who have woken up with their heads thumping and their mouths dry. "I did what?" we croak to our friends when they call to recount the tales of inebriated wildness.

The Received Wisdom now is to dismiss Diana and the reaction she caused with the words recently used by a tourism guide to describe her memorial fountain: "Wet and pointless." The Candle in the Wind was extinguished by the fake tears of the mob. The "floral revolution" has decomposed. Di is dead.

But there is a more complex story buried with Our Lady of the Flowers - a story about our basic human need for shared collective experiences, and about how our atomised, lonely culture cannot meet this need except at freak flashpoints.

But first, we should remember that behind the flashbulbs and the crowds, there was an actual person, and she did some good in her short life. Of course Diana was a bundle of aristo-flaws. She was a self-obsessed narcissist (but it would be hard to resist self-obsession when the world is obsessed with you). She was a kook, jumping on to any old mystical drivel-train from "spirit guides" to New Age healing. She was prepared to get into bed (literally) with some deeply dodgy figures, like the Al-Fayed family.

So it is all the more impressive that, at certain moments, she overcame these flaws to do something genuinely good. At the height of the "gay plague" panic, when people were afraid to sit on toilet seats lest they become HIV positive, Diana publicly hugged Aids victims, and the pictures ricocheted around the world. Today, when Aids is every trendy celeb's disease of choice, it's easy to forget how bold this was. Buckingham Palace ordered her not to do it, and the Sun chastised her for "putting the royal Princes at risk". The Windsor family's attitude towards the disease slipped out when Anne Windsor said Aids was "a self-inflicted wound". Diana faced them all down, and she went on to do the same with victims of leprosy and landmines. The effect was real, and it is worth remembering.

But more interesting than the woman herself is the reaction she caused. For a week after the crash, London became a Diana carnival, with miles of signs on the Mall and in the streets and a perceptible temperature change on the Tube. Like that morning in May when Labour finally won, and like on another darker September morning four years later, when people made tentative eye contact and they talked about the news. Londoners talked to each other, for what felt like the first time. The crowds thronging the parks and public places had an egalitarian feel. There was very little of the "hysteria" we hear about now - just people sharing tissues and drinks and snacks, and talking.

Because Diana said so little, we could project so much onto her. Did your husband cheat on you? Were your parents neglectful? She became a royal Rorschbach test: you could release grief for whatever you wanted, in a crowd of millions doing the same.

But it was more than that. In her brilliant book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, the American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich shows that human beings have evolved a deep atavistic need for moments when we all come together and engage in shared rituals. She writes: "Rock art from around the world depicts stick figures dancing in lines and circles at least as far back as 10,000 years ago. According to some anthropologists, dance and ritual helped bond prehistoric people together in the large groups that were necessary for collective defense against marauding predators." This instinct never went away. Our culture is very good at some things: generating wealth, say, or providing sexual freedom. But we are very bad at meeting this need for what the great sociologist Emile Durkheim called "collective effervescence" - "the ritually induced passion or ecstasy that cements social bonds". Instead we lived in sealed-off concrete boxes, and when we stand together, we look down and shuffle through our i-Pod playlists.

The reaction to Diana week is an illustration of the discomfort we feel about this: we have no language to discuss those shared moments after they happen, except as shame. There are only a few moments when we permit ourselves to be part of crowds: clubbing, rock concerts, football matches. If the collective bursts beyond these bounds, we become nervous. When we suppress it, this instinct often bubbles up in other ways: binge-drinking is in part a bleak attempt to dissolve yourself into a bigger, manic mass and forget yourself.

But what happens to us if we go without shared experiences? Expressions of mass euphoria were common among humans until they were gradually stamped out in the West from the 14th to the 17th centuries. An epidemic of depression followed. But the wealthy continued to close down public, shared moments because, as she puts it, "From an elite perspective, there is one inherent problem with traditional festivities and ecstatic rituals, and that is their levelling effect, the way in which they dissolve rank and other forms of social difference." This is precisely the fear that you hear from right-wing commentators dismissing the "emotionalism" of the "Diana mob": who do these people think they are, acting as if they are as important as Elizabeth Windsor and her family? Ehrenreich explains: "The essence of the... Western male, upper-class mind, was its ability to resist the contagious rhythm of the drums, to wall itself up in a fortress of ego and rationality against the seductive wildness of the world." It isn't over, Barbara.

By dismissing any mass coming-together, we actually suppress a basic human need. Is it a coincidence that a profoundly lonely society like ours - where few of us feel part of anything larger than our families and our workplaces - is a society taking industrial quantities of anti-depressants? Is it so strange that many of us felt elated by being part of the crowd that September? Instead of deriding Diana week, we should be searching for ways to periodically recapture the togetherness we felt then, for a flickering moment, before we crawled shamefaced back into our concrete boxes. We should not have to wait for the death of an aristocrat to come together.

You can read more of my articles about the British monarchy (and why they should be released from their gilded cage to lead happy, normal lives in the Republic of Britain) here.

You can e-mail me on this or any other subject at johann -at- johannhari.com

It’s hunting season again – and once more, the prey are the Windsor family and their wannabe-wives. On Diana Spencer’s last holiday before the paparazzi chased her at 65mph into a wall, she told reporters, “My boys are urging me to leave the country. They say it’s the only way [to escape these people]…William is stressed, William gets really freaked out.” Today, the same stalked boy is saying he wants “more than anything” for the woman in his life “to be left alone” by the omnipresent battalion of predator-photographers that camp outside her house and follow her everywhere, every day. There is only one way to get your wish, William.

To be a monarchist today, you have to be a sadist. I don’t say this as a cheap insult, but as a bleak observation of reality. You have to believe that in order for Britain to have an inherited ceremonial bauble as head of state, it is worth sacrificing the privacy, sanity and sometimes even the lives of one particular family who didn’t volunteer for the task and clearly don’t want it. You offer up the Windsors – and anyone they fall in love with – as red meat to be consumed to keep your institution going. The Windsor family has long referred to the sacrifices they are forced to make as “feeding the beast”. The beast is becoming more carnivorous than ever.

Look at William Windsor’s life, and how it has been marketed by the monarchists, handing him over to people he detests. At the age of fourteen, he had his first cover of Time Magazine, asking, “Can this boy save the monarchy?” Diana said, “He hates the press even more than I did when I first got into this family. He sees them as the enemy.” She told Jennie Bond, the BBC’s royalty correspondent, that William comforted her by telling her she was “very lucky to be able to give up the HRH.”

But he was not allowed a choice. The monarchists forced him to stay, to pose, to keep selling himself. While William was on holiday in the South of France with his mother in 1996, they stayed in a villa which could be seen from woods about 200 yards away – so the press set up their long-range lenses there. William became so determined not to give them anything at all that he refused to leave the villa during daylight hours. After several days of this, the holiday was cut short and they returned to London. It was a typical vignette in a life stripped of privacy.

He believes this kind of stalking “murdered” his mother – and now he is forced to watch his girlfriend endure eerily similar treatment. When Diana first became engaged to Charles Windsor, his mother Elizabeth Windsor summoned Fleet Street editors to the Palace to lecture them on why the non-stop harassment of her had to stop. The News of the World editor, Barry Askew, asked why, if the Princess wanted privacy, she didn’t send servants to do some of her shopping. Elizabeth, astonished that she was not commanding the respect she expected, snapped back, “That was a pompous remark, Mr Askew.” This was the moment that the last vestige of British feudalism died.

You would think nobody would ever again be so naïve as to expect the old deference from people whose sole interest was to make hard cash. Yet Kate Middleton’s family have tried the same, pleading for her to be left alone – as though the paps will surrender those £10,000 cheques out of sympathy. So many of the old mistakes are being repeated again in the endless misery-go-round of monarchy. Just as Charles was pressured to marry Diana, so there are reports William is being told by the Palace “to get engaged in the next year.” Diana confided years later that as she traipsed up the aisle in Westminster Abbey, watched by a billion people, she wanted to turn around and run. Who could blame Kate Middleton for feeling the same?

Of course, many people believe that the Windsors are handsomely compensated for these inconveniences, with lashings of cash, a slew of Palaces and a life of privilege. But what kind of privilege is it when you can’t step out of your front door? When you can’t choose your own job, your religion, your sex-life? When every conversation you have – on the phone, or with a friend – is up for auction, with newspapers offering hundreds of thousands for the details? Would you trade your privacy for a Palace?

All over the world, monarchies are melting under the burning pressure of a relentless global media market. In 2005, for example, Japan’s Sayako Kuroda renounced her position as a ‘Princess’ because she couldn’t take it any more. There is firm evidence William considered walking, although he has obviously been manipulated and bullied out of it now. Clive James, a close friend of Diana’s, once told me that “monarchy is no longer compatible with our 24/7 media market,” and he’s right. I believe strongly in all the old republican arguments – that it is absurd to have a hereditary monarch educated at Eton in the twenty-first century, and insulting to the British people to suggest we can’t do better – but shouldn’t even humane monarchists now recognise that their institution has become too cruel to sustain?

Some people have offered stricter privacy laws as a solution, and Charles Windsor’s lawyers are reportedly preparing a test case to sue certain photographers stalking Middleton. I’m in favour of privacy laws, but I’m afraid it’s foolish to think this will solve the problem when pictures of British royals fetch a fortune on the global market. Even if British newspapers were banned from printing harassment-images, there would still be a vast market from Argentina to Zanzibar. Even if a few photographers are ASBOed or even jailed, when there are such vast sums to be made there will still be a pool of hundreds more prepared to keep on stalking.

There is only one way – over the long-term – to end this problem. It is to call for a dignified end to an institution that has morphed from being a snobbish anachronism into a media-driven torture device. Of course, if William abdicated tomorrow, the paparazzi would not immediately leave Kate alone. But over time, the couple would recede from the public mind, and their children would recede further, until eventually the Windsors would only feature as sometime-curios in the “Where are they now?” pages. You can choose this, William, or you can choose a life of media-torment.

But – better still – we can choose it for you. We need a new republican chant: Help the Windsor family. Abolish the monarchy.

One of London’s most embarrassing roles over the centuries has been as the stage-setting for Britain’s royal family to parade their births, deaths and psychoses before alternately adoring and spitting crowds. From the scaffold on Whitehall where King Charles I was beheaded to the long concrete steps to Westminster Abbey where Diana Spencer was ceremonially deflowered and sacrificed before an adoring nation, London’s icons are ineradicably tainted by monarchy. The golden gates at the end of the Mall always seem to me like the least and lowest of our tourist attractions, a reminder that underneath all the teeming glory around you there is an unmeltable core of hereditary privilege you can never enter.

Strangely, some people have seen the biting, brilliant film ‘The Queen’ – currently topping the West End box office charts – as a movie that will bolster monarchism. It is the story of the bleak tango between Elizabeth Windsor and Tony Blair in the week following Diana’s final curtain in the concrete of Paris. With a perfectly repressed and bitter performance from Helen Mirren, the film explores what happens when a democratic media-driven culture crashes into a feudal family pickled in protocol and emotional repression. It uses real footage of Diana week, that beautifully surreal time to be in London, when the Mall was covered with a crunchy carpet of flowers and cards cursing the Windsors, and strangers stood weeping at a bare flagpole. Julie Burchill called it “a floral revolution”. I remember walking up Oxford Street on the Saturday morning of the funeral, every shop closed, central London totally quiet, and wondering if any other event in my lifetime would bring London to this static silence.

But the film – which makes any viewer feel a tender pity for Elizabeth Windsor – is only an advert for monarchy if you buy the tired old line that we republicans hate the Windsors while monarchists slather them with sympathy. In fact, the opposite is the case. The film shows how monarchists have tortured poor Elizabeth Windsor and warped her into a woman incapable of expressing the most basic human feelings. To find a childhood as profoundly weird the one monarchists have forced on Elizabeth, you have to look to Michael Jackson. She made her debut on the cover of Time Magazine at the age of three, and her mother taught her to chant as a toddler, “We are not supposed to be normal. We are not supposed to be normal.”

The child was taught she was an emissary of God, enacting His will by becoming monarch. As the film shows, she was deeply disturbed by watching her father reduced to a stammering, shaking wreck when he was forced to assume the throne after his brother did the one sane thing and abdicated. A life of such deep weirdness, doomed to the deafness that comes from only ever hearing sycophants, made Elizabeth Windsor into a woman who abused her own children by abandoning them as toddlers and forced to put up with a marriage widely alleged to be hellish. As Tony Blair says in the film, “She’s had fifty years doing a job she never wanted, fifty years doing a job that nearly killed her father.” This is an advert for monarchy? This is something the royalists are proud to have done to an innocent person?

All we democrats want to do is release Elizabeth and her tormented offspring to live very happy private lives in the Republic of Britain. It is the monarchists who want to continue torturing her, and creating generation after generation of gnarled freaks to fill her place on the sprawling, stained London stage. Yes, go and see ‘The Queen’ – and then join the fight to set the Windsors free form the sadistic institution of monarchy, and to set Londoners free from the sterile snobbery that surrounds it.

Reporter: Rafael Epstein
MARK COLVIN: She's hosted a lunch for 99 other octogenarians, and tomorrow's formal celebrations will include a by-now ritualised walkabout, followed by dinner with her son.

I'm talking about the Queen, of course, who's celebrating her 80th birthday.

Buckingham Palace has even issued a list of 80 little-known facts about the woman who heads the Commonwealth, as well as being Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of course Queen of Australia.

But for someone so well-known for so many decades, much still remains untold.

Europe Correspondent Rafael Epstein on what the Queen is really like.

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: Imagine watching your father reduced to a near nervous breakdown and a stammer because of the duties of his job.

Imagine praying your parents will have another child, a brother, so you can avoid a similar fate.

Imagine your parents leaving you when you're so young you can barely talk and they go for six months.

And imagine your first words to your parents being front-page news.

This was the life of the Queen as a child.

In the 1930s, when her uncle's abdication made her heir to the throne, her
childhood friend, Sonia Berry, noticed a change.

SONIA BERRY: Obviously she was heir to the throne then, and so things became more formal, we called her Princess, we curtsied to her. She grew up a lot. She became, well, more serious.

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: The Queen of course then began to curtsey when greeting her own father.

Her governess said the Queen's mother discouraged any real education and any mixing with other children.

And then the little girl her friends new as Lilibet became Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, with a coronation in 1953.

CORONATION AUDIO: God crown you with a crown of glory and righteousness …

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: Senior ministers who've worked with her say her "emotional machinery" is almost entirely out of order.

Royal writer, Graham Turner.

GRAHAM TURNER: She's been a very remarkable Queen. She's really been an icon of steadiness and good behaviour. But if you look on the domestic front, I think there are far more questions. The Royal family has been, I'm afraid, spectacularly dysfunctional. And I think some of the blame, sadly, must rest with the Queen. And I have a sort of feeling that Charles never felt that he had his parents' approval.

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: So what does it take to be the sort of monarch able to embark on hundreds of overseas tours, hand out hundreds of thousands of honours and receive and write millions of letters, and bring up a family?

Johann Hari is a columnist for the Independent newspaper.

JOHANN HARI: Well we don't know what Elizabeth Windsor would have been like had she not been subjected to a freakish and extremely cruel institution from the minute she was born. To find someone who's had a childhood as cruel and as strange as Elizabeth Windsor, I think you have to look to Michael Jackson.

So I think Elizabeth Windsor has been made into an emotional cripple by this very cruel institution.

People who know her very well, like Douglas Hurd, who was Foreign Secretary, British Foreign Secretary got to know her well on foreign tours and so on, say that she has very well-functioning constitutional machinery, but completely dysfunctional emotional machinery.

She has been taught to suppress all her emotions and emotional connections, and it has made her into a very odd person. It's obviously had a terrible effect on her children as well. I mean this is a woman who, when her eldest son was five years old, went away from six months. When she returned she spent a day working on her papers before she went to see the child. And when the child did finally see her he had to queue up in line and salute.

It's an extremely odd and cruel institution that would do that to anyone.

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: How confident are you that she is like that? I mean it's hard to know anyone, I suppose, even harder to know someone who has to be as private as the Queen.

JOHANN HARI: Well what's interesting is that her closest friends put it on the record. I mean, you know, what's odd is that we don't actually need to do very much guesswork.

Lord Porchester, or Lady Mountbatten, they're very clear. Because in their sick and warped world, they actually think these are assets, they think these are good things. They think it's to Elizabeth's credit that she doesn't ever cry and doesn't ever get upset and, you know, makes her children bow when they walk in to meet her.

MARK COLVIN: Johann Hari ending Rafael Epstein's report from London.

The British people are about to roll out the bunting and crack open the beer-crates to celebrate 80 years of tormenting, stunting and warping an innocent person. This woman was seized at birth, taught by her mother to chant “I am not normal, I am not normal” when she could barely walk, instructed to cauterise any emotions she might haltingly develop, denied a free choice over her job or husband or religion, and forced to work, work, work in unimaginably boring conditions long after her contemporaries had retired. Her name is Elizabeth Windsor. Her tormentors call her ‘The Queen’.

The birthday-wake for Elizabeth this week will be used by monarchists as another opportunity to peddle the myth that we have a blissfully happy monarch, a woman whose emotional needs are met entirely by her sense of duty to us, her adoring subjects, and by a gaggle of corgis. But the real story of Elizabeth Windsor should not be lost amidst this velvet-lined propaganda.

As a child, Elizabeth watched the institution of monarchy reduce her father to a near-permanent nervous breakdown. He hated the duties of being King, and developed a constant stammer so severe many people assumed he was mentally disabled. He even told his friend Ramsay Macdonald that he was so horrified and nauseous during the Coronation ceremony that he was entirely unaware of what was happening. Unsurprisingly, his traumatised daughter – according to her friend Lord Strathmore – began to “pray for a brother” who would take precedence over her in the succession and save her from this golden cage.

But the monarchists permitted her no escape. Her instincts towards freedom and normality had be snuffed out, most enthusiastically by her mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who was perhaps the most enthusiastic monarchist and (a logical twin) the most aggressive social climber in British history. She forbade Elizabeth from going to school, and her nanny Marian Crawford explained that, as a result, the child found it “very difficult” to make friends. There was one “rather special friendship”, but it ended when the girl was sent away to school and Elizabeth was left alone once again.

The child did not even have her mother for comfort. After putting her in purdah, her parents abandoned her for months on end as they met the “requirements of royalty”. When Elizabeth couldn't even talk, they jetted off to Australia for six months and barely recognised her when they returned. Their primary use for her was as propaganda for the monarchy machine: she made her first appearance on the cover of Time Magazine at the age of three, and her first words were front page news. Her best friend, Lady Patricia Mountbatten, reveals that “she was very aware that how she behaved in public was very important. For instance . . . she knew she must try not to cry.” To find another child who was so ruthlessly pushed into the public eye from infancy, you have to look to Michael Jackson.

Monarchy began to twist and deform her personality, making her unable to function. Don’t take my republican word for it – listen to Patricia Mountbatten: “You see, if you are brought up to live your life in the eyes of the world, you can't afford to be seen to be terribly sad, or in tears or cross or even unwell. You have to have such total control over yourself at all times that it then becomes quite difficult to show your emotions, even in private. I think that is a particular thing with the royal family - they cannot be seen to be other than totally composed and in control of the situation in public, and that spills over into their private life.” Almost everybody who knows her well agrees that it is monarchy that has misshapen her spirit in this way. Douglas Hurd, who got to know her very well when he was foreign secretary, says that while Elizabeth's "constitutional machinery" is in tip-top shape, her "emotional machinery" is almost entirely out of order because “she has almost trained feelings out of herself.”

She later re-enacted this pattern of abuse and neglect towards her own damaged children. Who can forget the clip of a tiny Charles Windsor waiting in line to shake his mother’s hand as she returns from a six-month “royal engagement” without him? As Anthony Jay, who scripted the documentary Elizabeth R, explains: "She's one of those people who is deeply unemotional. . . . For people who are emotionally detached in that way, institutions become more important than families. The Queen's children were handed over to nannies, and a kind of emotional cauterisation took place. Something was sealed off very early. For her, that is a strength. If she were emotionally involved, she couldn't do her job." It did not seem to occur to him that an institution that mandates psychological abnormality and child abuse should be ended.

There is only one fleeting, beautiful moment in her life when Elizabeth wriggled free from monarchy. When she first married Philip Mountbatten, they lived in Malta from 1950-51 and she tasted life as a comparatively normal high-end Navy wife. Marian Crawford said, “The Princess had no very clear understanding of the way people lived outside palace walls. But when she flew to visit Prince Philip in Malta, she saw and experienced for the first time the life of an ordinary girl not living in a palace.” Lady Kennard, a very good friend of Elizabeth's, has said: "I'm quite sure that the first five years they spent together [in Malta] were the happiest days of their life. The Princess was able to live just like an ordinary naval officer's wife and it was the only time that she lived such a free life." She could see the life she might have had, if only the monarchy had not existed.

Patricia Mountbatten says that being ripped from this life and forced onto the treadmill of duty was "a tragedy . . . From the Queen's point of view it was a disaster that it all [becoming monarch] happened so soon". But in reality, it is a tragedy for her that it happened at all.

This is what the monarchists have done to this frail, broken old woman. This is their achievement. They have locked her into an isolation ward of sycophancy for eighty years, deadening her emotions and deadening her mind, turning her into an neglector of her own babies and a woman with busted “emotional machinery”. Yet these same royalists dare to routinely claim that it is republicans who hate the Windsor family, when all we want to do is set her and her tormented offspring free to live very happy lives in the Republic of Britain, far from the public gaze and the dead hand of duty.

The only song we offer on this sad anniversary is – God Save the Queen from the monarchists who have ruined her life, and god save us all from the lukewarm bath of snobbery in which they soak our country.

Charles, more than any other royal except perhaps Margaret, has had his life ruined by the monarchy. The monarchy has put Charles in a uniquely savage position. He can only prepare for one job, but he can’t do that job until he is an old man. Indeed, it must have crossed his mind that he might never get to be monarch at all. His grandmother outlived one of her children; his mother, who seems likely to repeat that longevity, may well outlive him. Charles has always been acutely aware of the trap he’s in. As he told an audience at Cambridge University when he was in his twenties, “my great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is. At the moment I do not have one. But somehow I must find one.”

Charles’ frustration at not having a job is so intense that he has on occasion wished his own mother dead. He approached his then-brother-in-law, Charles Spencer, at the funeral of Diana’s father, and repeatedly told him how lucky he was to have inherited so young. He then added, “I wish I had inherited young.”

From birth, Charles has never been treated like a normal child. Lord Mountbatten said that “loneliness is something that royal children have always suffered and always will. Not much you can do about it really.” This was callous but true. Charles found it hard to make friends. He was taken to primary school every day in a royal limo, greeted at the gate by a bowing headmaster, and seen off by him at the end of the day too. His childhood was filled with bizarre special treatment. For example, it was judged that it would be terribly vulgar for a Prince to use a normal, common persons’ swimming pool, so for his school swimming lessons, his whole class was taxied to Buckingham Palace. When he started secondary school, the treatment was even worse: on his first day he was greeted by a crowd of members of the public gawking at him.

At every traumatic moment in Charles’ life, the ceaseless glare of the media has made the experience even worse. Every child find their first day at school unsettling – how much more so must it have been given that he was also accompanied by yelling hoards of photographers screaming his name all the way to the entrance? All of Charles’ rites of passage were splashed across the front pages. When he ordered a cherry brandy in a pub (moderate behaviour indeed for a fifteen year old), it caused a press furore that lasted weeks. When he was sixteen, a book of his essays was stolen and published in the German press. The pressure on Charles even at primary school was so intense that by the end of his first term, his headmaster complained that press intrusion was seriously impairing the functioning of his whole school.

In the biographies of all Royals, there is a moment when the awfulness of their fate becomes apparent to them. For Charles, it occurred when he was nine years old and he was summoned to his headmaster’s study. He was told to watch the television. His mother announced before a baying crowd that she was making her son into the Prince of Wales “today.” As Jonathan Dimbleby, who is a close friend of the Prince, explains, there was a “look of acute embarrassment which flashed across the face of the Prince. For him, it was not a moment to rejoice but the sealing of the inevitable, that ‘awful truth’ from which there was no escape.” What parent would put their nine year old child through this anguish? And what parent would do it without even warning him in advance, or calling him to offer comfort?

But then, we should bear in mind that Charles was a victim of abuse and neglect as a child which makes even this casual neglect seem slight. His parents, we must never forget, abandoned him for six months when he was only five years old. They often didn’t bother to see him on his birthdays even when he was very little. Even when he was in their company, the Prince was – according to interviews which he himself has given – treated with appalling cruelty by his father, who, according to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, would “seem intent not merely on correcting the Prince but mocking him as well, so that he seemed to be foolish and tongue-tied in front of friends as well as family. To their distress and embarrassment, the small boy was frequently brought to tears” by his father.

But even this cruelty was not due only to the twisted personality of Phillip Mountbatten but also to the institution of monarchy. One friend of Phillip’s explains that “Phillip hectored his son because it was the only means he knew to achieve his supreme objective – to mould a Prince for kingship.” Another says that “Phillip put his loyalty to the Crown above and beyond his responsibilities as a father.” So this is yet another significant way in which monarchy has broken Charles Windsor’s self-esteem and purpose in life.

Charles has been used since childhood as a PR puppet for the monarchy, a process his parents only encouraged. As the Daily Mirror columnist Cassandra wrote when, barely out of his teens, the Prince was subject to a preposterous ‘investiture’ ceremony: “He is to be turned into a puppet, publicly in front of all our eyes and ears…I find myself extremely sorry for Charles, principal boy in the pantomime at Carnarvon next July that should never have been ballyhooed at all: a young man who is already the plaything of outmoded politicians.” But this cruelty stretched right back to his childhood, when he was paraded by his parents before cameramen.

Treated with appalling cruelty at home, he was sent to a school which can only be described without hyperbole as a centre of sadism. At Gordonston, the journalist Ross Benson recalls, the windows would be kept open all night, so that pupils who were forced to sleep next to them “were likely to wake up with blankets rain-soaked or, in winter, covered with a light sprinkling of snow.” But this was the least of the problems pupils faced. Once lights were out, gangs of thugs would “roam the house beating up smaller boys, extorting food and money…and creating an atmosphere of ‘genuine terror’.” New boys would be greeted “by taking a pair of pliers to their arms and twisting until the flesh tore open.”

Charles was singled out for especially viscous treatment. Lads would deliberately attack him and then brag “we did him over. We just punched the future King of England.” Nobody would befriend him for fear of being accused of sucking up. When Charles told the headmaster that he had had his head forced into a toilet pan, he was told to stop being such a sissy.

Parents who failed to notice that their child was being abused in this way would be culpably negligent. Elizabeth and Phillip were not. They were worse: they knew everything that was going on, and they did nothing. He wrote to them constantly, explaining that it was “absolute hell” and that, to give but one example, “I don’t get any sleep practically at all nowadays… [The people in my dorm] throw slippers all night long or hit me with pillows or rush across the room and hit me as hard as they can… Last night was hell, literal hell.” But parents who had abandoned him as a child were happy to abandon him again now.

One of Charles’ few precious moments of freedom from misery and control was when he was seventeen. Following his trip to a remote community in Australia, a nun wrote that “it was grand to see him walking around Dogura – walking alone with no gaping crowds waiting for him…I do not suppose there are many opportunities for such times in his life.” She said that he had “come amongst them as if in a cage”, which, of course, he was. And even during those years, he was stricken with the knowledge that his parents still didn’t care. They didn’t even bother to meet the family he was travelling out to Australia with and going to live with for six months.

When he returned from Australia, the cage door snapped shut. He was given almost no freedom to chart the next decade of his own life. In 1965, a committee was set up to decide the Prince’s future. The Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury were on the committee, but Charles himself was not. They decided that he “would have to enter one of the armed services,” but that he should go to University first. Charles was eventually informed about their decisions. He was given no input at all.

Predictably, the decisions they made were grossly inappropriate for the ‘Prince’. He was far too unintelligent to go to Cambridge University, and he was almost comically incompetent in the navy. He couldn’t master navigation for the life of him (a pretty fundamental skill when you’re at sea), but they couldn’t punish his failures in the way they would with anybody else. As the Naval Secretary to the Ministry of Defence wrote, “the thought of Court Martialling the heir to the throne for a navigational error is good nightmare material.” In the end, he had to be given intensive course after intensive course until eventually he was receiving one-to-one tuition.

It was cruel to put an unintelligent man in positions like this, where he was bound to fail. Yet this points to perhaps the greatest cruelty of all. Charles has been surrounded by sycophants all his life. They have indulged his every whim, including the strange delusion that he is an intelligent man. This has gone on for so long that Charles Windsor now seems seriously to believe that he is an important thinker. A friend of his told Nigel Dempster, the journalist, that “he lives in an isolation ward of flattery. He goes to Hollywood and is told he’s handsome. He swaps jokes with a comic genius like Peter Sellers and the other Goons, and they fall down laughing. He boffs a woman once, and she tells him he’s the greatest lover she’s ever had… The best education in the world can’t defend you against sycophancy on that scale.” This process has warped Charles in innumerable ways; the saddest is that it has led him to believe he is intelligent and well-informed.

Yet in truth, Charles has always been thick. Even his very sympathetic biographer Jonathan Dimbleby admits that “he was by no means an apt pupil” at school. Despite some of the most expensive education money can buy, he sat only two A-levels, and in those he achieved the mediocre grades of a B in history and a C in French. He then attended Cambridge University, despite the fact that his grades were nowhere near good enough to merit admission. Predictably, his degree was a disaster, and he came out the other end with a polite 2.2., a qualification which one Cambridge don recently described as being given only to “the terminally lazy or the very stupid indeed.”

Even Charles’ closest aides admit that all too often he simply spouts whatever the last person to whisper in his ear has said. His very sympathetic biographer Jonathan Dimbleby admits that “they were uncomfortable with his tendency to reach instant conclusions on the basis of insufficient thought.” Edward Adeane, Charles’ private secretary for many years, was deeply disturbed by the fact that “Charles was extraordinarily easy to lead by the nose.” These are understatements.

Charles is not more thick than his mother and grandfather. The difference is that they at least seemed to know that they were hardly Steven Hawking and acted accordingly. His wife Diana cheerfully admitted that she was “thick as two short planks” but had other qualities that counted. Charles, in sharp contrast, has (to use AN Wilson’s useful term) no intellectual humility at all. Can you imagine him ever being as self-aware about his intelligence as Diana, who, after she bumped into a wall beam and he told her to mind her head, asked, “Why? There’s nothing in it!”

His stupidity can be illustrated in countless ways, but let’s start with his dire judgement in selecting mentors. Look, for example, at the exceptionally odd ‘Lord Mountbatten’. Elizabeth Windsor described him as “a medieval matchmaker”, and he certainly seems to have been obsessed to an unhealthy extent with attaching himself to the royal family. He would constantly boast about his (unreal) closeness to Elizabeth. He became obsessed with genealogy (the only integer of merit, according to the Windsors), and his biographer Phillip Ziegler explains that he only ever picked up a book if it was about this topic. We can only speculate now about the deep character flaws which led to this desperation. What we can say firmly is that it reveals a lot about Charles that he was drawn to such an unsavoury figure.

Exhibit B in the case of the People vs. Charles’ choice of mentors can be summarised in four words: Laurens van der Post. Charles revered Van der Post as a guru and epitome of all he admired. He took his books away with him on honeymoon, to Diana’s dismay. (She took only Danielle Steel, to Charles’ anger – but her novels probably have more basis in fact than Van der Post’s purported non-fiction). Charles wined and dined him, and made great efforts to boost Van der Post’s public standing. He even became William’s godfather. As Van der Post’s distinguished official biographer JDF Jones puts it, “for twenty years, they shared the most intimate conversations and correspondence. Charles even told him about his dreams.”

Yet Van der Post was, as Jones says, “a compulsive fantasist.” Amongst his many, many lies were his claims to have an aristocratic lineage, a glittering war career, remarkable political achievements (he claimed, entirely falsely, that he was the author of the 1980 Rhodesia settlement)… the list goes on.

For those who had any intelligence (a category into which Charles Windsor very obviously does not fall), the evidence was there. Van der Post admitted, for god’s sake, in one of his books that “this is one of the problems for me: stories are more completely real to me than life in the here and now. A really true story has transcendent reality for me which is greater than the reality of life.” Translation: I bullshit constantly.

Yet still his portrait hangs in Charles’ study. Under the influence of this charismatic but manifestly dishonest man, Charles allowed himself to be persuaded that Nelson Mandela was not the right man to be elected President of South Africa! Van der Post intoxicated Charles in particular with his tales of the noble savages who lived in the Kalahari. These condescending myths had long since been discredited by anthropologists (something Charles really ought to have known since he studied the subject at University – another sign of his thickness). Yet Van der Post claimed that the African peoples “participated so deeply” in the life of “animals, stones and rocks” that “the experience could almost be called mystical.” Charles lapped up this gibberish.

It is hardly surprising, I suppose, that Charles, with such an underdeveloped intellect, was attracted to Van der Post’s rhetoric, which stated that intellectual approaches to life were flawed and missed some unseeable, mystical ‘truth’ which we can only sense through the trees. Van der Post said that “we behave as if there were some magic in mere thought, and we use thinking for purposes for which it was never designed.” Charles kneeled in obeisance before this cascade of tripe. Indeed, Charles tried, rather dismally, to develop this line of thought himself. He told an audience of bemused Harvard graduates that “we have concentrated on the development of the intellect to the detriment of the development of the spirit.” This facile dichotomy, between the recognisable intellect and the vacuous spirit, must have been a great temptation for Charles. After all, people could point out that his intellect was painfully deficient, but who could say that his ‘spirit’ (whatever that might mean) was below par?

Van der Post went even further with this quackery and convinced Charles that the Old Man of Lochnagar, a fictional character Charles had created when he was twenty in a story for his little brothers, was Charles’ ‘guru’ inherited through the ages and embedded in Charles’ ‘collective unconscious’. How that old charlatan Van der Post must have chuckled at the extraordinary gullibility of the man.

But then Charles has always been wide open to cranks. In the 1970s, a young Indian woman persistently called Buckingham Palace begging to be put through to Charles. Eventually, she spoke to him and explained that she had a mission as a Buddhist to convert him to understanding the role of the Past Masters. Rather than shrug her off as a nutter, he invited her into the Palace and formed a friendship with her. She even converted him to vegetarianism.

But there is a common thread running through the lunatics and charlatans that Charles is attracted to. They all articulate some kind of ultra-reactionary hatred of modern life, and the desire to retract to a pre-modern, pre-industrial world. Van der Post, for example, was part of a wider movement which sought to oppose urban life and its cosmopolitan values, and replace it with a vision of a pure, ‘natural’ life in the jungles, deserts and forests. Van der Post dishonestly claimed that “by merely taking the most sophisticated people into the bush and wilds of Africa, we have produced the most startling re-educative and therapeutic effects upon their divided personalities.”

From thinkers like this – and Charles’ own endless speeches – we can start to piece together a vision of Charles’ political philosophy. Of course, describing Charles’ thought is difficult because it is so shallow, facile and at times incoherent: we ain’t talking Bertram Russell here. Nonetheless, there are recurring themes and leitmotifs. Charles is essentially a feudal thinker. Feudalism was the prevailing social structure before capitalism, and it is based on a mystical notion that everybody knows their place within nature. Feudal thinkers believe that we are each born within a particular part of the social hierarchy where we ‘belong’ and are destined to remain. Monarchy is the archetypal feudal institution. It is central to the thought of the ‘old right’ which has been so entirely eclipsed during the twentieth century by the new right and the left.

It shouldn’t surprise us that a man raised to believe that the feudal institution of monarchy is all-important has turned out to be attracted to long-dead feudal political ideas too. Charles not only aspires to head a feudal institution; he also lives like a feudal lord. Dimbleby says of him that as a landowner “he knew all the tenants, the farm workers and their families, their names, their histories and their lives.” Just like the old Lords of the Manor were expected to before those new-fangled ideas like capitalism and equality of opportunity came along…

To find a Western feudal political thinker who is taken seriously we have to go back to the first Prime Minister of the twentieth century, Lord Salisbury. Andrew Roberts’ definitive biography shows that, like Charles, Salisbury was sceptical of industrialisation and idealised the countryside and aristocratic pursuits as somehow more in tune with nature than the vulgar, egalitarian world of the city. The public voice in Britain closest to Prince Charles’ is the hard-right quarterly the Salisbury Review. Like him, they often fulminate about the lack of Shakespeare in our schools, the arcane question of which should be the authorised prayer book, the state of the countryside, and various other reactionary obsessions. Charles even used his privileged position to lobby the Prime Minister with the odd idea that all teenagers should be sentenced to community service.

Charles and the Review, in keeping with their feudalism, venerate Nature (it is always capitalised) as the ultimate good. Often, this simply takes the form of quasi-mystical verbiage dressed up as though it were an intelligent comment. For example, he has uttered the meaningless following sentences: “It is high time we once again respected flights of the spirit; high time we concentrated our collective efforts on unleashing the vast transforming and regenerative potential which lies within the individual as a member of the community.” What can he possibly mean? Does even he know?

This anti-modern instinct can be positively pernicious when it comes to an analysis of developing countries. He said of the economic development of Africa, “is all this development really progress?” What, things like clean water and sewers and all that? Well, yes, actually, you fool. He dismissed the “squalid little houses” of African towns, from the comfort of his five palaces.

His ascription of special, nostalgic powers to non-European peoples is always offensive, but at times hilarious too. At a Commonwealth dinner in the 1980s, Charles made the following entry in his diary: “I saw [all the Western delegates making awkward small-talk] while the others [from non-western countries] merely sat and contemplated the infinite by looking straight through the person sitting opposite them….I sometimes wonder whether the people who sit throughout…three hours of dinner without uttering scarcely a word [sic] are in fact picking up some kind of thought transference from their neighbours by remaining silent? Slowly but surely I am beginning to indulge in little periods of silence.” Could this entry be parodied?

Further evidence of Charles’s exaltation of that nebulous concept, ‘nature’, and those who he judges to be ‘close’ to it, can be found in a speech he delivered in 1982 in which he said that doctors “should be intimate with Nature.” It has also led to an obsession with unproven ‘alternative medicine’ techniques. Michael Baum, the Professor of Surgery at King’s College Hospital School of Medicine, pointed out that the treatments Charles cited approvingly had nothing but “anecdotal case-reports” to back them up. Baum warned of “the tragic consequences of adopting therapeutic revolutions on the basis of a plausible scientific hypothesis in advance of its scientific testing.” Normally a mild man, Baum was provoked to say that Charles was “guilty of the most extreme intellectual arrogance, or more charitably, of confusing fiction with fact.” John Diamond, the journalist who was dying of cancer, took particular offence at Charles’ ridiculous claim that there were effective ‘alternative’ therapies for cancer.

Charles had dabbled in mysticism and non-scientific, ‘spiritualist’ thought before. He had been drawn to parapsychology as a student. This is an occultist school of thought which believes in a ‘super-natural’ magic which can stretch as far as summoning angels. Nor did he keep these odd beliefs private: he even wrote to a University Vice-Chancellor urging him to establish a Chair of Parapsychology, describing it as “of immense significance in terms of the ‘invisible’ aspects of our existence in this universe.” Again, he never questioned whether it was inappropriate for him to use a hereditary, non-merit based position to seek to influence public affairs in this way.

Following the death of his close confidante Lord Mountbatten, Charles became deeply attracted to the Buddhist actress Zoe Sallis. She gave him the book ‘The Path of the Masters’ and became determined to make him believe in reincarnation. He began to speculate about how Mountbatten might be reincarnated. (The Prince’s private secretary, Edward Adeane, intervened and told the Prince that he simply was not free to believe what he chose: he was destined to be head of the Church of England – another cruelty monarchy has inflicted upon him.) He tried to link all these beliefs in with his feudal politics, in what can only be described as an intellectual mish-mash which resembled a traffic pile-up. But to him, it all looked perfectly consistent.

There has, however, been one clear thread running through all his arguments: his clear desire to disparage and insult atheists at every opportunity. He told an audience at the Salvation Army centennial that “what we should be worried about is whether people are going to become atheists, whether they are going to be given an idea of what is right or wrong [he implies, extremely insultingly, that the two are linked and that therefore atheists don’t know right from wrong]…These are the things that matter.”

Charles’ intellectual arrogance (an odd quality for a man with no intellect) also emerged in his contribution to the ‘debate’ about the English language. He said that he and others “wonder what it is about our country and our society that our language has become so sloppy and so limited that we have arrived at wastelands of banality, cliché and casual obscenity.” He added that “all the people in my office, they can’t speak English properly, they can’t write English properly. All the letters sent from my office I have to correct myself.”

In no other speech has the corrupting influence of monarchy on Charles Windsor been more clear. He does not have a good or even adequate grasp of English himself. His own writing is, to use his own phrase, filled with banality and cliché, and his speech is itself filled with casual obscenity (fancy being a tampax, anyone?). I strongly suspect that the ‘corrections’ he makes to letters are in fact altering an already correct sentence. Yet nobody has the nerve to tell him because it simply isn’t the done thing to correct a ‘Prince’. So he is allowed to live with this delusion that he speaks wonderful English and nobody else does.

Poor, pathetic Charles. No wonder he thinks the rest of the world is always wrong: after all, isn’t he surrounded by people who convince him he is always right? Hasn’t he always been surrounded by these people? A former girlfriend of Charles’ recently said, “The amazing thing is that Charles might have lost a lot of public respect, but he lost none of his friends – even when his behaviour was appalling, even when he had cuckolded one of his best friends. Why? Because he is a Prince.” So even his friends, it is clear, don’t mention these things. They do him no favours in the long term.

Despite having no recognisable intellect or ability, Charles, scandalously, is accorded a public role and his statements about public policy are taken seriously. Amongst his blatantly political roles (for which he has no qualifications at all) in the last year have been: firstly, his fierce advocacy of vaccination in the foot-and-mouth crisis, which he was able to put to the Prime Minister repeatedly. Why? If an ordinary member of the public, even one who was an expert in the disease unlike the know-nothing Prince, had called the Downing Street switchboard, they would not have got through to Blair. Why was Charles allowed extensive access simply because of who his mother was?

Secondly, Charles is a government ‘design tsar’, giving him the power to stamp his ‘vision’ of classic architecture on Britain’s new hospitals. This is despite the fact that the Prince’s architectural skills are so poor that he was given only a 2:2 in his degree in the subject. The initiative was, according to an aide quoted in the Observer, “very much his own idea.” (Who else would have thought of him?) “He will be talking to firms directly,” apparently. His earlier forays into the world of architecture have been failures: his plans for an eco-friendly model village in the Hebrides had to be ditched. Yet, surrounded by sycophants, Charles has not got the message that he is too untalented and thick to meddle in this area. No, he meddles on. Charles even had the nerve in December 2001 to accuse architects of having “inflated egos”: the lack of self-knowledge is breath-taking.

Thirdly, the Prince acted as an “unofficial envoy” during the war on terror. Charles and his spin-doctors were eager to see this task trumpeted in the press (it made the front page of the Daily Mail) despite the fact that it was meant to be a behind-the-scenes job. Charles’ task was to keep the Saudi royal family – notoriously one of the most corrupt, decadent and totalitarian ruling houses in the world – on side because he is so friendly with them. Yet even in this, he was unsuccessful: the House of Saud has publicly distanced itself from the ‘war on terror.’ Downing Street had to waste its time, at a vital moment when every second counted, listening to Charles’ whining that he should be found a role, and then finding somewhere to shunt him off to. Far from being helpful, having a brainless Prince chuntering around the globe was an unneeded distraction.

This was part of a long and rather desperate attempt by Charles to find a foreign policy role for himself. He infuriated Margaret Thatcher for one when he conspired inappropriately with the Foreign Office to systematise his relations with the Middle East. Thatcher rightly saw this as an attempt to set up a Foreign Office in miniature without any reference to that tiresome bunch, the democratically elected government. As one Foreign Office civil servant said, when Thatcher found out, “the sound of breaking furniture could be heard all around Whitehall.” Busy Prime Ministers should not have their carefully rationed time wasted like this. Charles can’t, I suppose, be blamed personally for this though: the very institution of monarchy guarantees that he will be surrounded by yes-men who convince him that, simply because of who he is, he has something to contribute.

Fourthly, Charles has a predilection for offering utterly irrelevant personal blue-prints. He has in the last year authored articles titled ‘My blue-print for NHS hospitals’ and ‘My vision for urban renewal’. He even in the 1980s wrote a book called ‘Vision of Britain’. Erm, hasn’t anybody told him that Kings and Princes don’t have any remit in public policy anymore? His highly political statements have absolutely no relevance. It is offensively arrogant for him to assume that simply because of birth, he has the right to offer these ‘visions’ and expect them to be treated seriously.

But then, we should be aware that Charles believes that the monarchy has a right to be superior to politicians. When he first attended a meeting of the Privvy Council, an institution which contains all current and former Cabinet ministers, he wrote that “I daresay many politicians would like to do away with this particular institution and establish something more rational and modern but it is one of the last remaining links between Crown and Parliament and does help to remind ministers that there is one final authority that is not themselves.”

He thinks, then, that it is a good thing that the people’s democratic representatives are reminded of the undemocratic “final authority” that hangs over them. Similarly, he has said that he “will not be diverted from using the authority of his position to speak out across a range of public issues.” But what authority does his position have? Why on earth should a hereditary position have any authority at all? The very idea is madness. Charles has often shown that he expects to be treated differently because he is a Royal. He insists that politicians call him “sir” and “your royal highness” still. He even believes in a hierarchy within the royal family itself, showing that he believes people are carefully ranked according to birth into a caste system-style hierarchy (feudalism yet again). He once screamed at his father, “Don’t you realize you are speaking to the next King?”

One small sign of his arrogance is revealing. He was given a list of the rules of the University of Aberystwyth when he was a student there. It said at the bottom, “His Royal Highness…would comply with the rules and regulations,” to which he responded by writing, “Like hell!” Another can be found if we look at when Jim Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister, tried to find some meaningful work for Charles in the mid-1970s. Callaghan suggested that Charles take a job in Whitehall or the Cabinet Office, or as a member of the Commonwealth Development Corporation. Charles refused to do the job unless he could enter at the absolute top.

In an interview with Mary Riddell last year, Charles made the extraordinary claim that “as usual I am rubbished and ridiculed.” Hello? Does he have no awareness of his own position at all? If it were not for who his mother happened to be, his nonsensical speeches and articles simply wouldn’t appear at all. Nobody would publish the articles or turn up to hear the speeches, for he has nothing intelligent or incisive to say. Far from being ‘rubbished and ridiculed’, he is granted a respect and attention he does not deserve. When Charles delivered one of six Reith lectures in 1998, he was the sole lecturer not to answer questions at the end. It’s clear why: his arguments were so nebulous and often risible that he would have been ripped to shreds. He plainly lacked the intellectual rigour to stand up to cross-examination.

There is nothing wrong with being stupid; some of the people I most love in all the world do not have the quality of intelligence, but have other, wonderful qualities. What they don’t do is delude themselves that they can cut it as intellectuals, and then get all sour and bitter when they aren’t treated as such.

But Charles emerges time and again as a man who, hilariously, believes that he is an intellectual prophet who is being ignored by foolish figures like the government. He told Mary Riddell, “on integrated healthcare, on sustainable agriculture and public private partnerships I have had to battle and battle and battle against a complete wall of opposition.” This opposition comes from “everyone, everyone. All the professional bodies, the institutions, the media.” This truly is the deafness that comes from only hearing sycophants. Never once does it seem to occur to him that it is not the government, the professional bodies and the media who are wrong, but him. After all, this triumvirate of critics actually take the trouble to either become elected, work hard for qualifications and expertise, or actually attract customers, not activities which the unaccountable Prince ever troubles himself with.

He went even further in a speech to the British Medical Association in the 1980s so arrogant that it defies description. He said – clearly in reference to himself – that “Perhaps we [meaning ‘I’] just have to accept that it is God’s will that the unorthodox individual [i.e., me] is doomed to years of frustration, ridicule and failure in order to act out his role in the scheme of things, until his day arrives and mankind [!] is ready to receive his message, which he probably finds hard to explain to himself [that’s because you’re thick and inarticulate, Charles], but which he knows come from a far deeper source than conscious thought [like Lauren Van der Post, perhaps?].”

It might seem cruel to repeat Charles’ deranged speeches which imply that he is a Moses-type figure, and it might seem even more cruel to mock them so heartily. But isn’t the ultimate cruelty to let him continue in these bizarre delusions without pointing out that everyone is laughing at him? I can only think of those times we’ve all experienced when you emerge from the dressing room in a clothes shop and say, “do I look good I this?” Some friends will say you look fine to bolster your feelings in the short term, even if you look hideous. I’d rather be told that I look awful in something because then I won’t buy it. In the same way, Charles needs to be told that he isn’t Moses leading us to the promised land. His true friends aren’t the ones who allow him to think that he has discovered some deep underlying truth about the universe that, if only the rest of us were as smart as him, we’d all acknowledge. His true friends should tell him that he simply doesn’t have the intellectual calibre to make this kind of speech, and that he should just move on and find something else to do.

However, I wouldn’t recommend a career in business. Charles has also showed crass unintelligence in his dealings with the corporate world. Guardian journalists Oliver Burkeman and Angelique Christafis helpfully chronicled the Prince’s idiotic relationship with Spanish tiling firm Porcelanosa. Charles – a man who is a multi-millionaire many times over – accepted a garden worth over £100,000 for his private home at Highgrove. In a blatant reciprocal favour, Charles hosted a lavish corporate party for the firm, and flew over to Spain to supervise the opening of one of their factories. Charles appears to have been too stupid to realise that this would inevitably come to light, or too arrogant to care about the perception that the British monarchy is available for hire despite the fact that its members are paid a massive wage to serve the British people.

Charles appeared not to realise the hypocrisy in his stance when he argued that, in light of the ‘Sophiegate’ embarrassments, personal business engagements were incompatible with royal status. Sophie might well have been tempted to answer his criticisms with two words: Armand Hammer.

Hammer was the elderly chairman of Occidental Petroleum when he first bought Charles. Now, you might think that the head of one of the most polluting oil firms in the world would be an unlikely friend of Charles the self-proclaimed environmentalist and lover of nature, but that would be again to foolishly presume that Charles has any coherence or consistency.

(Remember: this is a man who preaches fuel conservation yet drives one of the greatest fuel-wasters in the world, a Bentley – or rather, three of them. This is a man who took a trip to the USA to inspect urban slums and spent half the trip playing polo. This is a man who preaches about agricultural traditionalism but was quite happy to shut down his own ‘model farms’ so that he could make an extra few quid by ‘rationalising’ the Duchy of Cornwall. His hypocrisy is so blatant that you have to almost admire his nerve).

Hammer was keen both to donate large sums to charity and to make it very well known that he had done so. So Charles allowed himself and Diana to be bought for a night by Hammer in return for a $1 million dollar donation. So they turned up at his ball and gave this weird old crook (who was, oddly, a long-time sympathiser with the totalitarian Soviet Union) a great deal of kudos. Hammer was delighted to be viewed as yet another one of Charles’ dodgy gurus.

Quite why Charles is so intoxicated by the ultra-wealthy is a mystery. As Prince of Wales he has inherited (or ungratefully accepted from us, the tax-payers: it depends on your perspective) the Duchy of Cornwall, which adds £321 million to his personal fortune. It gives him an annual income in excess of £7 million. This should, of course, be largely considered public income and go back into the tax pot to pay for schools and hospitals. Instead, it is claimed exclusively by one man. He must, admittedly, hold it in trust: Charles must pass it onto the next Prince of Wales, and he cannot touch the Duchy’s capital. Who on earth thinks that Charles works sufficiently hard to earn £7 million a year, more fifty times the wage of the Prime Minister? The government at the very, very least should claim rightful ownership of the Duchy, use the vast sums it earns to pay for public services, and pay Charles a reasonable wage for the job he does – perhaps £50,000 per year, a little below the rate for a school headmaster.

But taking all the profit from the Duchy – our Duchy – isn’t enough for Charles. In 1999, Charles sold 2500 acres of trees which he claimed to own privately to the Duchy (us). His insistence that he owned this land privately (rather than as part of the Duchy) was rather undermined by the fact that the trees were planted on Duchy land and their maintenance was paid for by the Duchy. Even Duchy officials admit they had no need for the timber. The ‘Mail on Sunday’ argues that this was a devious way to get around the rule that bars the Prince from selling capital assets for his own profit. Not content with the millions he already receives, this supposedly humble Prince wanted an extra few million in the bank.

He clearly sees taking exorbitant amounts of money from the state as his birthright. This greed becomes even more striking when you realise that the Prince is given access to a huge amount of expensive luxuries free of charge. If, for example, he wants a swish holiday abroad, he has more than enough super-rich friends who will lend hi premises for nothing. His friend John Lastis (who, as an oil tycoon, is a strange bed-fellow for a self-professed environmentalist) has lent Charles his £25 million yacht over ten times since 1991, entirely free of charge. He doesn’t even have to pay for his London flat (we do) or his transport to official functions (for which we stumped out a whopping £1.3 million last year).

It would be wrong, however, to say that Charles, has not done some good things. Despite his awful, warping upbringing, which has cruelly made him into the grotesque caricature he is today, he has tried to do some good for the poorest people in our society. He has used his privileged access to the wealthy to establish an excellent charity, albeit one rather self-servingly entitled the Prince’s Trust. The Trust carries out valuable work day in, day out with some of the most disadvantaged young people in Britain. A friend of mine was given a grant by the Trust to set up his own business, and it turned his life around. Yet even the work this has taken fills Charles with self-pity: he told Riddell that “I’ve tried to make the most of the position I’m now in. If that kills me in the process, then so be it.”

Charles’ commitment to charity and the poor is, however, somewhat undermined by his own relentless decadence. This is, of course, an imitation of his grandmother Elizabeth Bowles-Lyons. A palace insider has said that “his attitudes are very like hers. He mirrors her view of life.” His grandmother has encouraged him “to be really royal, in the old style.” When Charles travels, he demands seven bedrooms to himself. This includes a dressing room, a room where he can write his letters, and accommodation for his preposterous number of servants. His staff includes three butlers, four valets, four chefs, ten gardeners, and more. He insists that his staff at Highgrove wear specially designed uniforms and bow to him every day when they first speak to him. The journalist Graham Turner has described Charles’ Sandringham parties. “To start with, there must have been 20 or 30 servants…Everybody had their own individual valet or maid and, each evening [at dinner]…jaws dropped open at the splendour of the table, the silver, the decorations, the flowers, the statues and the lighting.”

His mad self-indulgence is occasionally comic. He spent hundreds of thousands of pounds building a garden which he wanted to be “the outward expression of my inner self.” It is less funny, however, when you realise that he is spending hard-earned tax-payers’ money which could be used on schools, hospitals and caring for the elderly. Charles uses £3000 a week of public funds from the Duchy of Cornwall to pay for the upkeep of his partner, Camilla Parker-Bowles, who doesn’t perform any public duties at all. Yet his private office provides her with a car, pays her household bills, and splashes out on the upkeep of her horses. He used public RAF jets to take his kids and some friends over to Zurich and then on skiing. His squandering of our money is offensive, to say the least.

Yet it is hard to blame Charles Windsor for his obvious character flaws, because we are always drawn back to admitting that he was appallingly badly brought up. Even now his parents treat him in a despicable way. At the time of the ‘Camillagate’ revelations, the Queen was concerned that “Charles’ melancholy and his sense of defeatism would outweigh his sense of duty to the Crown.” This is true cruelty. Your son as been publicly humiliated and ridiculed after a dreadful invasion of privacy, and he entirely understandably becomes deeply depressed and tempted to withdraw. Yet your reaction is to worry not about that but about an inhuman institution. This is the climate in which Charles was raised. Is it any wonder that he is such an odd man?

And now, of course, we much dicuss the relationship which is central to his life but which the institution of monarchy prevents from being formalised. The story of Charles and Camilla is actually a very moving love story. The first time they met, Camilla strode towards him and said frankly, “My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather’s mistress. How about it?” From that moment on, they appear to have had a special bond which has endured their marriages to other people and several intervening decades.

Yet they are unable to marry without constantly monitoring grotesque opinion polls, with intrusive findings like (in a poll to mark Charles’ 50th birthday!) 40% believe they should marry and 46% believe they shouldn’t. He is also constantly conscious that – uniquely for a man in his fifties – his mother can block his marriage. A senior courtier has explained, “On this issue, the Head Lady is not for turning. She has rehearsed all the constitutional and legal arguments…and knows she can block the Prince of Wales from getting married. To her, Charles either becomes king and puts Camilla aside, or marries her and reconsiders his future.”

Confronted with appalling parenting and the distorting effects of monarchy, is it any wonder that Charles is – well, the way he is? What is a little shocking is that Charles doesn’t even seem aware of his own freakishness. When Mary Riddell told him he seems like a very normal dad, he said, in a voice she describes as “suddenly querulous and huffy”, that “I don’t see why people think I am abnormal.” He has been so abused by monarchy that he can’t even see how warped he has become. That, perhaps, is the greatest tragedy of all.

Later in the book, I discuss the idea that Charles Windsor and his mother are 'apolitical':

The monarch’s political influence will be even more offensively undemocratic in the unlikely event that Charles Windsor becomes King. What on earth would happen if – in a not unrealistic scenario – he found himself with an anti-organic food, pro-GM, anti-PPP government? Would he use his weekly meetings to lobby the PM with his totally unrepresentative and unchecked (not to mention ill-informed and poorly understood) views? How could any democracy tolerate such an insult?

Indeed, Charles has already used his position completely inappropriately for political influence, as I hope I showed fairly comprehensively earlier. But just to reiterate the point, it’s worth bearing in mind that the Prince admitted to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby that he specifically intervened in disagreements within the Thatcher government in order to press for his own political beliefs and argue against the (democratically elected) Secretary of State, Nicholas Ridley. He used every possible opportunity – including meetings with the Secretary of State and meetings with his ministerial rivals – to lobby in favour of one of his (blatantly political) pet projects. He provoked the normally sanguine Ken Clarke (then Education Secretary) into a fit of rage when he blatantly tried to affect the content of the National Curriculum.

He is such a notorious political in-fighter that Michael Heseltine told him he had “all the hallmarks of a seasoned politician.” One former minister, Peter Morrison, has recounted how Charles called him into Kensington Palace and screamed and shouted and banged his fist on the table when Morrison wouldn’t accept his arguments.

We therefore have very strong reason to believe that he would try to pressurise a Prime Minister in the same way. It will be utterly impossible to maintain the myth that the monarch is apolitical or above politics: our next monarch is unashamedly a political lobbyist with his own highly politicised agenda. He even publicly admitted that “I understand the perimeters in which I can operate but at the same time I’m quite prepared to push it here and there because I happen to be one of those people who feel very strongly and deeply about things.” At least we can’t say he didn’t warn us.

My point here is not to say that he shouldn’t talk about politics. Seeking to influence public policy is an admirable desire in any citizen. If, as is clearly the case, Charles wants to do this, he should abdicate and stand for election or try to get a job as a policy advisor or journalist. What he cannot legitimately do in a self-respecting democracy is claim a right to access to those at the highest levels of government simply because of who his mother is.

Charles tried, when he was a student, to get involved in politics. He asked the master of his college, Rab Butler, if he could join the Labour, Conservative and Marxist parties, hoping that the overlapping memberships would cancel out any accusation of political bias. Butler refused permission. Of course, if Charles abdicated, he could join any party he wished.

It is worth pointing out that, just as the monarch (and future monarchs) try to use politicians, so politicians often try to use the monarch. Ben Pimlott describes eloquently the first such occasion in Elizabeth’s reign, when as Heir Presumptive she was sent on a tour of Northern Ireland where she was a blatant political tool in the Loyalist battles against the Republicans. He describes how an “almost hysterical atmosphere of loyalism” accompanied the tour. The pattern of using Elizabeth has continued intermittently. She was similarly manipulated by Harold Macmillan into selecting his preferred candidate to succeed him as Prime Minister, an episode which even devoted monarchists now acknowledge to have been a serious misjudgement on the Queen’s part.

Despite all this, some monarchists still argue, ridiculously, that Elizabeth Windsor and her heir are apolitical. Look: Elizabeth does two hours of government paperwork a day. What do the monarchists think this paperwork is? They cannot have it both ways. They cannot say on the one hand that the monarchy has no power and is purely decorative, yet on the other hand laud the Queen’s incredibly hard work on constitutional matters. Only one of these compliments can be true.

To read the full story, you can buy the book by clicking on the little advert to the right.

My book 'God Save the Queen?' is still available in all good bookshops (and probably some crap ones).

Here's the opening chapter as an extract:

PART ONE – FEEDING THE BEAST: HOW THE MONARCHY HAS DESTROYED THE LIVES OF THE WINDSOR FAMILY

Monarchists are torturing the very people they claim to love and respect. Every member of the Windsor family has been fed at birth into the sausage-machine of The Monarchy, and it has pulled and tugged and stamped at them until they are Monarch-Shaped. In the process, they have become deeply damaged human beings. This book will show how every Windsor has been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment which would never be accepted if it were forced upon a ‘normal’ citizen.

In royal circles, they refer to the sacrifices they are forced to make for the monarchy as “feeding the beast.” I will, first of all, show just how painful that feeding frenzy has been, and, secondly, ask whether the institution of monarchy is a beast worth feeding at all.

But before we begin that painful journey, I need to tell you a little bit about how I came to be writing this book. In January 2002, I wrote a cover story for the New Statesman which surmised, on the basis of evidence already in the public domain, that William Windsor does not want to be King. I drew only on very reputable sources, and my editors and I had confidence that we could make this sensational set of revelations stand up. The story caused a small ripple – ‘Le Monde’ ran it on their cover, with the headline ‘L’affaire William’; the Daily Mail cheekily ran on their cover a story headed ‘The Boy Who Would (rather not) Be King’, without crediting me as a source; and so on, for a week or so. I thought the story had run its course and I shut royal affairs out of my mind.

Three weeks later, I met (through a mutual friend) a person who is unquestionably very close to William. He was very eager to know “how I had found out.” He didn’t say quite what he thought I had found out. I was of course very cagey and deliberately ambiguous, hoping to give the impression that I knew more than I did in the hope that he would inadvertently reveal some interesting facts. It swiftly became clear that in William’s closest social circle, there is a frenzied debate about whether William wants to be King, and he was only talking about his real plans to a select few. My contact explained, “There’s only one of about ten people who can have talked to you. With everybody else, he avoided the topic. But with us, he’s always been very honest that being King is the last thing he wants. So which one of the twenty was it? Was it -” and then he began to reel off a few names, none of which I knew.

I blabbered something about not revealing my sources and then chuntered to a halt. I was obviously very intrigued by what I was being told, but somehow I had to act very calm, as though I’d heard it all before. Clearly, this guy had assumed that somebody was blabbing to me - how could I use this? Hmmm. Then, for reasons which I still don’t understand, I suddenly used the bluntest (and most ridiculously unrealistic) instrument in my armoury. I tried to calm my heartbeat and asked ever-so-sweetly if, maybe, perhaps, ummmm, William himself would be interested in talking to me, off the record? He paused. In those beautiful, precious seconds, I had visions of writing ‘William: His True Story’, and reaping an Andrew Morton-sized fortune to go with it.

“I’ll find out…” he said. “But don’t hold your breath.” Then it all went quiet again.

I rushed about working on other stories, as usual, for the next month, and gradually lost hope. One day, I was in our offices, in the middle of talking on the telephone to a radical plastic surgeon who believes he can give people wings (it was for an article, I don’t want wings m’self), when my mobile began to vibrate. I glanced at the screen: it was William’s close friend. I hung up without even saying goodbye.
“Hi, it’s (name deleted),” he said in that odd, semi-cockney accent which only the exceedingly posh can ever achieve.
“Oh – hello. I’d forgotten you were due to call,” I said with a shrug. Like he’d believe that.
“Can we meet for a drink some time? Totally off the record, yah?” he asked.
“Well, let me check my diary…” I rapidly flicked some random pieces of paper so it would look like I was checking whether I had space in the diary I had (as ever) forgotten to take off my desk at home. “Well, actually,” I explained, “I have got a window in my schedule, err… NOW!” Okay, too desperate. Calm. Calm. “I mean, if that’s okay, it’s just that the rest of this week is terribly…”
“Okay. Where?”

Three minutes of agonising small-talk and sipping Pepsi. Oh, god, I just want to ask you if he said yes. Enough already!
“So, err, did you get a chance to…”
“Look. I tried. I talked around the subject. I mentioned that I had seen your article…” – I was virtually panting by this point. Morton megabucks, here I come… - “and he hated it.”
I pasted a smile onto my face. I’m a hardened journo, me, it was meant to say. Burst into tears just because one person hated my article? Pah! That’s for wimps! I grinned as hard as I could.
“Do you want a tissue?” he said.
“That obvious? No, I’m fine. Why did he hate it?”
“His dad went mental. The Queen went mental. He was forced to have arguments he wanted to put off for a few years.”
“So I was right?”
He swigged from his glass of gin. “Johann – of course you were.”

We talked for over two hours that day, and much of that conversation informs the chapter on William in this book. By the end of our long chat, my source was obviously getting anxious. He was slightly drunk and perhaps realised that the alcohol had loosened his tongue a little too much. He excused himself with a brisk handshake and strode off, a little too purposefully given the gin he’d been drinking all night because he walked straight into a pillar.

This is how royal history gets made, I thought: by rat-arsed posh people walking into pillars. I tried ringing him lots of times in the next few months. I always got his answer phone. He has never returned my calls.

So, alas, what you’re holding isn’t ‘William: His True Story’, or anything like it. But it is an informed insight into the very cruel world William has been forced into. What I am trying to craft here is a new argument about monarchy, and it is one I now know William agrees with. I support all the old republican principles, but, frankly, they ain’t winning the argument yet. So we need a new, Williamesque republicanism (apologies for sounding a bit Tony Blair circa 1997 here) which argues that not only is monarchy bad for Britain, it’s bad for the Windsor family themselves.

As I ploughed through the research for this book, I was amazed again and again by how blindingly obvious it is that the monarchy has broken and destroyed each of the Windsor family in turn. We must not let this happen to William and Harry, and their children, and their children and their children and so on verily until the Apocalypse. The monarchy is now an institution that can only produce fucked-up and unhappy people. It’s time we ended the misery. This, then, is how the centuries of British monarchy will end: Not with the bang of a revolution but with the whimper of a Prince.

But in order to get to the day when the Windsors are set free from the monarchy, I need to do something which no doubt monarchist critics of this book will accuse of hypocrisy. I am going to intrude into the Windsors’ privacy. I am going to draw on sources (including the tapes of private conversations which were, disgustingly, made public by the tabloids) which should not exist, because they are so intrusive. Yet one of my central arguments against the monarchy is that it opens up the individuals at its heart to a completely unsustainable degree of monitoring and supervision by the media. So how can I justify doing the very thing I’m attacking?

In order to show how intrusion has fucked up the Windsors, I need to use the fruits of intrusion. All I can do is admit that I feel very uncomfortable doing it, and I hope in some small way it begins a debate which will end with the Windsor family being released from intrusion. I pledge – and I expect all decent republicans to do the same – that once the Windsor family retires from public life and ends the institution of monarchy (an event which I fully believe will happen within my lifetime), I will never write about them ever again, and I will violently condemn anyone who does. The intrusion into their privacy within this book is a regrettable necessity designed to show how the monarchy has damaged the Windsors. It is a means to an end: setting us on the road to the rescuing of the Windsor family from the clutches of the cruel institution which is destroying their lives.

Of course, there are some decent and honourable republicans who say it is wrong to talk about the Windsors at all. Tony Benn opposes the personalisation of this debate; it should, he argues, be about constitutional principles. Against this, I argue that in practice the British monarchy is inextricable from the Windsor family. Nobody seriously suggests that we could keep the institutions of monarchy but ditch the Windsors. We’d have to find a new royal family – and though the House of Beckham would certainly be tempting, it’s extremely unlikely.

We cannot discuss the monarchy, then, without discussing the individual Windsors. Prince Charles himself, in an interview in 2001, made it clear that personalities are central to any debate about monarchy. When Mary Riddell asked him what monarchy was about, he replied, “God, all I can talk about is the way I think it should be. That is not necessarily how my successors see it. It is a personal thing, the whole business of monarchy.” Similarly, in the 1992 BBC documentary ‘Elizabeth R’, Elizabeth says, “In this existence, the job and the life go together – you can’t really divide it up.” So both Charles and Elizabeth have placed their own personalities at the absolute centre of the debate. If they are prepared to do that, I am only too happy to discuss it in their terms.

The monarchists have unashamedly used any favourable aspects of the personalities of the Windsor family to bolster the institution; we republicans are therefore perfectly entitled to reciprocate by discussing those very personalities. Remember, it was the other side who introduced the personality weapon into the war, so don’t blame us for its presence on the battlefield.

When he retired as Palace Press Spokesman in 1967, the famously reactionary Commander Colville publicly expressed his prescient fears about the lives of the Windsors being “progressively more exposed to public scrutiny,” and he said that there was difficulty distinguishing between “what may be properly termed as ‘in the public interest’ and what is private.” He seemed to think that a line could be drawn in the sand and consensus achieved about where this division lay. But he misunderstood the fact that monarchy in a celebrity age can only sell the individuals at its heart: and once it begins to sell that product, it cannot control the appetite for it. It cannot say, thus far and no more; it cannot reserve anything for the private individuals at its core.

The justification behind press intrusion into private lives of the famous is that the celebrities have asked for it – and monarchy cannot exist without asking for it. The royal family are therefore doomed to perpetual press intrusion against which they have very few sensible retorts, and certainly no effective ones. The days are gone when the Windsor family thrust themselves and their new-born babies into the public spotlight and expected nothing but praise in return.

This is not to attack the royals and say therefore they must surrender their privacy. Rather, we need to all agree that nobody should be put in a position where they are forced to make that choice. It’s nobody’s fault that we ended up with this situation. Nobody planned to put people in this untenable position. It’s just that, by chance, the monarchy has evolved over time in a way which makes it unbearably cruel to the individuals who happen to be the royal family. You might be feeling sceptical about this argument right now. So: let’s look at each of the Windsor family in turn…

You can buy the book at www.amazon.com and www.amazon.co.uk

Christopher Hitchens said about it, "Here is the plain proof of the child-sacrifice that underlies our most absurd and sinister institution."

Julie Burchill said, "I love this book! It's like eating a whole box of chocolates in one go."

The Independent on Sunday (before I worked at the Indie!) called it, "Fantastically gripping and provocative...one of the most convincing books on the monarchy you'll ever read."

Arena Magazine said: "An enchanting, boisterous read that provides further sound argument for the forced removal of the House of Windsor... Hari makes a compelling case that monarchy is an institution inflicting abuse not only on democracy, but also on the Windsors themselves, denying them religious, political, and sexual freedoms that even their most strident supporters enjoy."

Janet Street-Porter (again, before I worked with her) called it "excellent", Victor Lewis-Smith in the Evenign Standard called it "brilliant". Rachel MacAlpine said, "This book is shockingly rude and intemperate and I believe every word. Johann Hari articulates what a lot of people know, but never say, at least in mainstream newspapers and journals. He pulls no punches. This is no measured, objective analysis: it's a rave, born of frustration and anger... I'm glad I read this scary little book."

The New Zeland Herald said, "Johann Hari has transformed our view of the monarchy... Excellent." The Scotsman called the book "fascinating", and the Syndney Sun-Herald said, "It would be easy to assume that an analysis of the royal family by a republican journalist would be a series of vicious character assassinations. But it is quite the opposite. Without the sycophancy expected of those granted royal access, Hari shows a compassion for the Windsors that monarchists would find disturbing.

In fact, this is Hari's main thesis. 'Monarchists are torturing the very people they claim to love and respect,' he writes in his opening essay. Of them all, Charles receives more of Hari's pity than anyone. He has become a walking, talking example of how badly a royal life - one spent waiting for your mum to die so you can assume her job - can screw you up... This is republicanism with verve and wit. It should be embraced by Australians, along with, of course, all the positive reasons for having one of our own as head of state."

"I think they should just be left alone to live their own lives," says Jean Lowen, 58, as she cranes her neck to catch a glimpse of Charles and Camilla. "I agree," says her friend, "It's cruel the way they're forced to live in the public gaze all the time and - wait - is that them? No, it's another police-woman."

Last time Charles Windsor got married, a billion people huddled around their televisions, a half-a-million people huddled around St Paul's Cathedral, and the bride wanted to turn around and run. This time, the televisions roam impatiently over a thousand channels and I am standing in the cold, surly streets of Windsor with the 15,000 final, foaming fans of monarchy.

The mood of the mob - a curious mixture of Barbour and Burbery, Queen Victoria and the Queen Vic - is bemused and bored as they wait for the royal cortege. "I thought they would put on clowns or something for the kids," says one mother. "Is this it?" asks another. Children scream. Parents moan. A few Union Jacks - provided by the Sun - are waved in the frosty wind. The biggest placards are huge arrows directing the crowds to the nearest McDonald's.

Then the TV cameras approach and everybody springs to vigorous, cheering life. "Whooh! Yeah!" shouts Jean. "Yay!" says her friend. "Charles! Camilla!" bleat the crowd. It's like we are all conspiring in producing a media product, a propaganda video about a Prince-loving public. The cameras are switched off, and the crowd sags back into a sullen mass.

Somebody spots a group of celebrity lookalikes on a nearby balcony, employed to promote an on-line casino. "Elton - sing us a song!" yells one man, to polite laughter. A few people join in. "Sing! Sing!" they chant. Apologetically, the mini-Elton says, "I'm a lookalike. I can't sing." The crowd falls silent then - turns to the David Beckham lookalike. "Kick us a ball! Kick! Kick!"

A rumour ripples through the crowd: the couple aren't going to pass this way. "We're at the wrong place. They're not coming here," says one woman, angrily waving a newspaper map. Nobody moves. They carry on blankly staring at the empty space sealed-off by metal railings, like cows in a field.

The scene slowly morphs into a Samuel Beckett play.
"They're not coming?"
"No. They've been. They're gone."
"Then why are we here?"
"Don't know."
"Something will happen."
"Yes. If we wait long enough."
"Wait. We should wait. They'll come."
"But they're gone."
"Let's wait."

Just as I am about to gnaw off my left arm in boredom, a group of girls runs through chanting "Diana will always be the Queen of our hearts!" I rush up to Grace Michaels, 16, who explains, "There will always be three of them in that marriage. Diana will never die!" A woman in her mid-fifties looks them up and down and says, "Listen love, we all wish it was Diana and Dodi getting married today, but they're dead. Just settle for this lot and wish them well."

I ask the crowd what they would say to republicans like me who see this as a sad farce. "Get lost!" cries one. "You're sick! Why do you hate the royals?" demands another. But it's not republicans who are torturing the Windsor family, I say - it's monarchists. We want to set Charles Windsor and his family free to live normal, private lives in the Republic of Britain. Charles and Camilla could have married thrity years ago if it wasn't for the creepy demands of monarchists that Charles marry a virgin and produce an heir.

They glare, speechless, in my direction. "There they are!" screams somebody suddenly. The crowd pushes me aside and surges forward. "No, it's the lookalikes," somebody moans.

Hours pass; Charles and Camilla do not come.

And Out There - beyond the Windsor streets - I can feel the nation and the world giving an almighty shrug.

I've done a few bits and pieces on the Charles/Camilla wedding. You can hear the first interview at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/saturday/default.htm

(select 7.10 and skip to 20 minutes in)

I did another gig on the BBC Richard Bacon program at http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/programmes/bacon.shtml

(Skip to 1hr 12 mins in).

If anybody wants to type up a transcript I'll post it here... (If you do type out a transcript, e-mail me to let me know, give your address and I'll send you some press copies of books I've got knocking about)

Nobody should be surprised by the revelation this week that Charles Windsor - Britain's future head of state - believes it is "PC beyond belief" for a black female secretary to aspire to something more. Charles was raised in a family obsessed with the belief that worth is based on birth, birth, birth. A small army of "low-born" servants and sycophantic "high-born" aristocrats have been on hand all his life to reinforce the belief that there is an intricate, semi-mystical class pyramid in Britain, and that Charles was born and belongs at the top. Louis Mountbatten, his mentor - and the closest thing he had to a real father - was obsessed with genealogy and would entertain a young Charles for hours with the intricate descriptions of how the aristocratic families of Britain were interconnected.

So why should we be surprised to find that Charles is one of the last people to take this world seriously? With his background, how could he not? While for the rest of Britain the world of aristocracy and monarchy has been reduced to a trivial sideshow, Charles has tried desperately to reassert the case for natural hierarchy, and railed against a meritocratic system where the "ordinary think they are qualified to do things far beyond their technical capabilities". For more than two decades now, he has been trying to build an intellectual case for these beliefs in his many speeches and books. Charles's interest in the environment and causes such as GM food has led some people to mistake the Prince for being something of a leftie. In fact, he is an old-right feudalist, a man who longs for a world where everybody knows "their place" under Nature and nobody is troubled by "dangerous ideas like progress" and science.

His whole life has been a long, slow immersion in this pre-20th century ideology. Charles was taken to his primary school in a limousine by servants every morning. The royal staff began to bow to him when he was in his early teens; all adults began to call him "Sir" when he was just 16. But, worse, this mindset saturated even the most intimate relationship for a child: that with his mother. Charles was always instructed to treat his mother with deference from the time he could speak, and to accept that she could not be a "normal mama". There is extraordinary footage of a tiny five-year-old Charles standing in line as he waits for his mother to return from a six-month state visit to Australia. (She had been back in the country for two days already, but had chosen to deal with her paperwork rather than see her child.) Charles's mother walks down the line, shaking the hands of each dignitary in turn. When she finally reaches her son, she shakes his hand too, and walks on.

Brian Hoey's biography of Elizabeth has a tiny, telling detail about how deeply the ideology of monarchy has warped the relationship between Elizabeth Windsor and her children. Hoey was chatting to Anne Windsor, Charles's sister, when her mother called. Anne instinctively stood to attention as she spoke to Elizabeth on the telephone. He explains that "it appeared to be an unconscious act resulting from an upbringing which instilled good manners ... when addressing the sovereign, and it was somehow symbolic of the attitudes within the royal family that divide them from the rest of us". If Charles ever wants to see his mother - even today - he must despatch a page, who will make an appointment for him. He addresses his mother as "Your Majesty", bows his head when he greets her, and would never dream of wearing casual clothes in her presence. The former foreign secretary Douglas Hurd has described it well. He says that Elizabeth's "constitutional machinery" is in tip-top shape, but - thanks to monarchy - her "emotional machinery" is almost non-existent.

In the lives of every member of the Windsor family, there is a small moment of freedom before they are locked into the prison of monarchy. When Charles was 17, he went on a long trip to a remote community in Australia. A nun who helped to look after him wrote at the time, "It was grand to see him walking around Dogura - walking alone with no gaping crowds waiting for him... I do not suppose there are many opportunities for such times in his life." She said that he had "come amongst them as if in a cage", which, of course, he was. And even during those years, he was stricken with the knowledge that his parents didn't seem to care. They didn't even bother to talk to the British family that were responsible for looking after him for six months in Australia. When he returned, the cage door snapped shut.

If Charles did not convince himself that all this was for a purpose - the mystical purpose of monarchy - how could he bear to carry on? How could a man raised with such casual cruelty bear to acknowledge that the class-pyramid ideology that justifies it all is worthless? Rather than face these hard truths, he understandably began in his early 20s to plunge himself deeper into the philosophy that was wrecking his life. As a landowner, his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby explains, "he knew all the tenants, the farm workers and their families, their names, their histories and their lives" - just like a true feudal lord.

Around the same time, he first attended a meeting of the Privy Council, the institution which contains all current and former Cabinet ministers. He wrote, "I dare say many politicians would like to do away with this particular institution and establish something more rational and modern but it is one of the last remaining links between Crown and Parliament and does help to remind ministers that there is one final authority that is not themselves." It did not seem odd for him to assert his supremacy to our elected politicians, simply on the basis of birth. The monarchist indoctrination had succeeded.

This pre-modern philosophy also guaranteed the great PR failure of Charles's life: that he could never be a decent husband to a 20th-century woman. Charles never learned through the simple process of trial and error how to treat people decently, because monarchist deference meant he was praised no matter how great the error. This would corrode the personality of any human being. One ex-girlfriend of his told gossip columnist Nigel Dempster, "An awful lot of women who went to bed with him would never have gone to bed with him if he had not been HRH. However badly Sir treats you afterwards - it's a kind of pact: you know that the royal psychology is based on the notion of rule, right? - you only get what you deserve."

So when Charles was confronted with a young wife whose deference quickly wore thin, he could not cope. Diana's father had told her on the eve of her wedding that "a prince is condemned to a unique and lifelong loneliness. Don't expect too much in the way of friendship at first". But she had grown up reading Cosmopolitan, not Debrett's; Charles's psychology was incomprehensible to her, as it is incomprehensible to most of his "subjects". Charles could only react with rage - his tantrums against Diana have been well documented - and retreat into the bed of the more old-world, keenly deferential Camilla Parker-Bowles.

Monarchism has not only convinced Charles that black secretaries are "naturally" at the bottom of the heap. It has convinced him that - since he is at the top - he has a right to almost unlimited material indulgence. His personal fortune stands in excess of £300m, and his annual income is more than £7m. His grandmother, the late Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, encouraged him "to be really royal, in the old style." When Charles travels, he demands seven bedrooms to himself. This includes a dressing room, a room where he can write his letters, and accommodation for his battalion of servants. His staff includes three butlers, four valets, four chefs, 10 gardeners, and more. He insists that his staff at Highgrove wear specially designed uniforms and bow to him every day when they first speak to him. The journalist Graham Turner - who has a high degree of access to the royals - has described Charles's Sandringham parties. "To start with, there must have been 20 or 30 servants... Everybody had their own individual valet or maid and, each evening [at dinner]... jaws dropped open at the splendour of the table, the silver, the decorations, the flowers, the statues and the lighting."

It is hard to miss the irony when it was revealed this week that Charles said apropos of Elaine Day in a 2003 memo, "What is wrong with everyone nowadays? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their technical capabilities? ... People think they can all be pop stars, High Court judges, brilliant TV personalities or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having natural ability." The institution of monarchy - and the deafness that comes from hearing only sycophants - has made it impossible for Charles to acknowledge that he has no more qualifications to be head of state than Elaine Day except for his DNA. Despite having the most expensive education money can buy, he got only two A-levels, at grades B and C. He was swept into Cambridge University even though he didn't even nearly match the entry requirements. Once there, he was given a 2:2 in archaeology and anthropology - and this was widely considered a "polite" grade doled out for a future monarch. Since then, he has demonstrated no particular skills, and his books - such as My Vision for Britain - would, publishers admit, certainly not have made it past the reject pile if it were not for Charles's royal title.

Nor has Charles put in much of the work he claims women like Day must show if they are even to contemplate "rising above their station". James Callaghan, the Labour former prime minister, tried to find some meaningful work for Charles in the mid-1970s. Callaghan suggested that Charles take a job in Whitehall or the Cabinet Office, or as a member of the Commonwealth Development Corporation, to extended his understanding of government. Charles refused to do the job unless he could enter at the absolute top. A Channel 4 investigation into Charles's work schedule in 1998 found that he worked, on average, just one and a half days a week. Buckingham Palace figures are misleading because they brag of hundreds of events attended by the prince a year. They fail to mention that as many as five events can be crammed into a day - leaving the rest of the week free.

Yet the humane response to this is not to be angry with Charles himself. The institution of monarchy has inflicted terrible psychological damage on him since he was a toddler. The snobbery and hatred of meritocracy that have been revealed this week are simply inevitable further by-products of monarchy. Charles's political statements are simply evidence that he is trying desperately to apply the mindset of a medieval institution to the modern world - and inevitably failing. If you were raised to believe you were the head of a mystical form of rule, you would be just as bad. Do not blame the man. Blame the institution.

[You can comment on this article by clicking on the 'Forum' button above. A comments option will be added to this site in the next few days.]

June 24, 2003, Tuesday

SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 12

LENGTH: 829 words

HEADLINE: GET OUT, WILLIAM, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE

BYLINE: JOHANN HARI

BODY:
At last William has admitted to having "anxieties"
about the cruel, weird world of monarchy. Who
wouldn't? Solely because of the tragedy of his genes,
he is required to give up his freedom of religion, his
freedom of speech, his right to choose a career, his
right to vote, his privacy, his romantic and sexual
freedom... you get the idea. And, thanks to the joys
of monarchy, William - a randomly selected person who
never chose to be a public figure - is a direct target
for terrorists, and most of them aren't comedians. And
yet - despite the very anxieties (stirrings of common
sense, more like) that I have reported over the last
year - he has now declared that "those stories about
me not wanting to be King are all wrong... It's not a
question of wanting to be King , it's something I was
born into and it's my duty."

William, you need to remember your gnawing doubts.
Remember when you told your mother that she was "very
lucky to be able to give up her HRH"? (Diana told
Jennie Bond, an unimpeachable source). Remember when
you refused to take the HRH title yourself when you
turned 21, a stunning act of independence and
rebellion? Remember when your mother told reporters
that you "hate the press even more than I did when I
first got into this family", that you "see them as the
enemy"? And yet - you are not stupid - you know that
once you start to play the royal game, the press will
see you as their property until (no, including) the
moment you lie dying. A royal is never free; you
glimpsed that truth once. Remember your
great-great-uncle, Edward VIII, who described his
abdication as "a liberation". Remember.

Yet now William has been bashed into becoming a true
Windsor, one of Them. He is even beginning to look
less like a soft, pretty Spencer. The shots of him in
Diana-like poses released a few days ago looked false;
he has acquired the horsey expression so
characteristic of the Windsors. The rebellious Spencer
spirit that made him doubt his "fate" has trickled
away, so far and so fast that now he speaks the arid
language of "duty" like a pro. He has acquired the
typical Windsor cackhandedness when it comes to
Diana's specialist subject, public relations. Who on
earth thought it was a good idea for William to have
an "Africa-themed" party consisting of white
aristocrats dressed in a mockery of African tribal
gear? Immersed, to his great detriment, in that
bizarre world, he seems to have acquired the Windsors'
taste for the worst aspects of lingering White Africa.
The monarchists have now inducted him fully into their
ugly, offensive little culture. The gatecrasher
dressed as Bin Laden must have seemed sane compared to
the bowing, scraping madness of the Windsor family and
the clique around them.

So what awaits William now that he is reconciled to
this world? Perhaps murder at the hands of terrorists
(both his father and grandmother have been shot at).
Perhaps death as he tries to flee the ceaseless,
tireless pack of photographers who will stalk him
every minute of the day. (Would Diana would have been
dashing through Paris at over 100mph if she had never
become a royal?) Perhaps just a life of miserable
"duty", doing nothing interesting, being hounded and
photographed everywhere, seeing every woman he loves
bullied and psychologically broken by a press that
will never, ever leave her alone. That, realistically,
is the best case scenario for him: a golden goldfish
bowl of misery.

He has seen flashes of this already. For example, he
admitted this weekend that his royal status nearly
wrecked his time at university. It "crossed my mind",
he says, to drop out: "I went home and talked to my
father during the holidays and throughout that time
debated about whether to come back... My father was
very understanding about it and realised I had the
same problems as he probably had." You will suffer all
his problems, William, and then some. Press scrutiny
gets more intense by the year - especially of a fit
lad like yourself - and you have been given
comparatively light treatment over the last few years.
The piranhas will be dropped into your tank as soon as
you graduate.

For too long, republicans allowed themselves to be
portrayed as hating the royal family. But we are not
the ones tormenting the Windsors; it is the
monarchists who want to enslave them and republicans
who want to set them free. Now the monarchists have
indoctrinated and bullied William into accepting a
fate that, as he admits in this weekend's interview,
he does not actually want ("It's not a matter of
wanting..."). The monarchists have taken his teenage
rebelliousness and crushed it, so that he sees the
miserable life awaiting him not as a choice but as a
dull inevitability. The monarchists will gloat that
they have successfully plucked the wings off this
butterfly; republicans should shed a passing tear, as
- I am regretfully certain of this - William will be
doing soon enough.

HEADLINE: COVER STORY: WHY WILL WON'T ...;
PRINCE WILLIAM CELEBRATES HIS 21ST BIRTHDAY NEXT
MONTH. AND WITH HIS

BYLINE: JOHANN HARI, Heirs to the throne: Prince
William with his father, the Prince of Wales

BODY:
One man has the power to finally destroy the British
monarchy. No, not our best republican thinker Roy
Hattersley, nor our best republican rabble-rouser Tony
Benn, not even our constitutional moderniser Tony
Blair. The man who will finally herald the Republic of
Britain is a soon-to-be- 21-year-old named William
Windsor - or, as the history books might record him,
William the Last.

It is time we all admitted three basic facts: William
does not want to be king; he hates the idea of being
king; he will not be king - ever. When I first
suggested this in the New Statesman more than a year
ago, professional royal watchers reacted with
embarrassed silence. They exist in the comfy world of
briefings from the Palace, and they rely on patronage
for every strained line of sycophantic copy. Royal
correspondents are very reluctant to break the party
line and bite the velvet-gloved hand that feeds them,
and they know almost nothing about the younger royals.
Publicly, then, they scoffed; privately, I suspect,
they sweated.

But gradually, since then, they have begun to
acknowledge the truth at the heart of this story. Our
tabloids lead with revelations about William's pining
to escape this country for the United States, his
refusal to co-operate with the Palace (and especially
not to make his 21st-birthday party into a public
event), and his detestation both of the press and of
the institution of monarchy. A slew of recent books by
royal experts such as Ingrid Seward (editor of Majesty
magazine) and Brian Hoey have begun belatedly to hint
at this. Yet as a country we have still to absorb the
fact that the person who is second-in-line to the
throne just ain't going to play the royal game.

But why would William want to renounce the throne, and
all the status, luxury and hard cash that comes with
it? One anecdote begins to point to his thinking.
Nicholas Davies, the royal expert, has revealed that
during one holiday in his mid-teens, William was
tobogganing down a steep hill in the dark. When he
neared the bottom of the slope, where cars were
passing, a detective leapt out, seemingly from
nowhere. He threw himself on to the sledge and sent
William hurtling into a pile of snow. William
screamed, "Why do I have to be surrounded by policemen
all the time? Why won't you just let me be a normal
person?"

It's a good question: why won't we let him be a normal
person? Why do we insist on a human sacrifice just so
we can cheerfully retain a feudal head of state for us
to torment? William's life has at every step been
warped and distorted by the sadistic institution of
monarchy. Wherever he goes, he is followed by an armed
private detective who is at most 50 yards behind. On
his first day at school, there were 150 photographers
waiting for him. His primary school had to have its
windows replaced with bullet-proof glass. He has been
threatened with anthrax attacks by terrorist groups.
He had to be driven even from his school to the
playing fields in his last year at Eton, in order to
avoid the paparazzi. William's moments of anonymity
are so precious that he can list them. In 1999, he was
representing his school in a cricket match. The scorer
walked up to him in a tea break and brusquely demanded
to know his name. He said simply, "William." The
scorer snapped, "William who?" When it was explained
by the other boys who he was, the scorer was profusely
apologetic, but William nearly cried as he said,
"Thank you. Thank you! You don't know what that just
meant to me."

William has seen the institution of monarchy destroy
the lives of his parents. His father is doomed to wait
impatiently for his own mother to die just so he can
have a job. Charles has been forbidden to marry the
woman he loves; he was forced to marry a
manic-depressive whom he didn't even especially like;
and he has been so surrounded by sycophants and
deference since birth that his personality is
irreparably warped. Yet even his story is a happy one
compared to Diana's. On holiday in St Tropez shortly
before she died, Diana told reporters that "my boys
are urging me to leave the country. They say it's the
only way - William is stressed, William gets really
freaked out." Famously, William was the one to comfort
Diana when she suffered at the hands of the press. He
once pushed some tissues under the bathroom door and
said, "Don't cry, Mummy."

While holidaying with her in Lech in 1995, William
reacted with fury when a group of photographers broke
an agreement that they would take no more pictures of
Diana that day. He had an aggressive altercation with
them and threatened to take their cameras away. The
situation was resolved only after a personal detective
reasoned with the prince and secured a promise from
the photographers that they would leave.

William firmly believes that the press killed his
mother - and who seriously believes that Diana would
have been speeding at more than 100mph through the
streets of Paris without a seatbelt if she had not
been hounded by the paparazzi? Evidence for this
intense hatred of the press litters William's
life-story. He chose his university specifically
because it was far away from the London media. He
rides a motorbike in St Andrews because it makes it
much harder to photograph him if he is travelling at
speed. In 1997, he asked his parents not to come to
his sport's day because the press attention would ruin
it for everyone. Even during his 18th-birthday
television interview, when he was on his best
behaviour, William stressed that he was
"uncomfortable" with the press attention. Diana said
"he hates the press even more than I did when I first
got into this family. He sees them as the enemy."

Yet what is the monarchy now, if not a ceaseless media
roadshow, selling nothing but itself? How can the
royal family exist in the public consciousness if not
through the flashbulbs and omnipresent cameras? A
prince who hates the press is a prince who cannot do
his job. "William knows that," a close friend of his
told me last year. "That's why he wants to walk away
from it now."

Ah, you might be thinking, these are hassles, but he
receives a fair bit of compensation for them. Doesn't
he get a few palaces, worldwide fame, a fleet of cars
and unimaginable luxury? Doesn't that make the job
seem a little more appealing? This ignores a basic
fact. William could walk away from the monarchy
tomorrow and still be a fantastically rich man. He
could walk away from the monarchy more easily than any
other heir to the throne in history. William's immense
personal fortune is completely unconnected to his
royal status - a unique situation. No matter how rich
Charles Windsor appears to be, if he gave up his
connections to "the Firm", there would be a huge
conflict over whether he owned anything at all. The
Duchy of Cornwall, the source of virtually all his
income, is owned not by Charles but by whoever happens
to be Prince of Wales. If he surrenders the title, he
surrenders the wealth. Edward VIII was dependent on
his brother's generosity after he abdicated, and had
almost no personal funds. William, in contrast, is
sitting on a cool pounds 8m inherited from his mother.
With this legacy, she achieved one final blow against
the Windsor family, even in death.

We live in far too individualistic an age for us to
expect one boy, randomly plucked, to sublimate his
entire life to the arid concept of "duty". There was a
bridging period in the 20th century after the monarchy
had lost most of its power, in which the individuals
at its head could be induced to sacrifice themselves
because, well, everyone was being sacrificed, one way
or another. Elizabeth Windsor could be told that she
would have no life because her whole generation had
been called upon to give up their lives to combat
Hitler's fascism. As she revealed in the documentary
Elizabeth R, "It's just a question of maturing into
what you're doing and accepting that here you are and
that's your fate." But the generation that could yield
such stoical, self-sacrificing monarchs is passing
into history.

Charles Windsor apparently remains convinced that
William's current attitude is just a teenage phase -
but William is 20 and has been resolved within his own
mind on this issue for four years. How long can a
phase last before it becomes a settled, immutable
belief? Charles has, according to Christopher Andersen
(a contributing editor to Time magazine, and thus no
tabloid hack) tried to get other people to intervene
to persuade William that he must be monarch. Mark Dyer
was William's bodyguard during his gap year, and he
was asked to talk William round. They had many long
conversations, but William was unwavering and clear:
he will never be king.

The psychological pressure that the monarchy has
heaped upon William is immense. In July 1996, when
William was 14, he was put on the cover of Time
magazine with the headline, "Can This Boy Save The
Monarchy?' The answer, surely, is now clear. What will
ultimately destroy the monarchy, then, is not
republicanism (though that will help). No, it will be
the sheer inhumanity of monarchy in a
celebrity-obsessed, 24-hour media culture. Prince
William, conscious of the terrible effect this had on
his mother, will walk away before the press can argue
that, like Diana, he is "asking for it", "thrusting
himself into the limelight" or "loving the attention".
As it stands, he can make an unimpeachable case that
he deserves to be left alone.

Yet time is running out for William to make this
decision. The rapacious tabloids are beginning to
demand that he metaphorically shows us a bit more leg.
Annoyed that he does not give more official photo
shoots, the Murdoch press has begun to run paparazzi
images - in contravention of the agreement made after
Diana's death. Speculation about William's girlfriends
has begun. In a chilling article in the Daily Mirror
earlier this year, its royal correspondent James
Whitaker said, "I am not sure what to make of Prince
William of Wales. Is he a whingeing wimp because of
the way he complains about snappers taking pictures of
him every now and again? Or is he a person who needs
on-going protection until he decides the time is right
to go more high-profile?" The message is clear: one
day, boy, you'll be ours, and there's nothing you can
do about it.

So what happens to the monarchy if William quits?
Constitutionally, the throne could easily pass to
William's younger brother Harry. But all the evidence
suggests Harry is even more wilful, individualistic
and ill- inclined to sublimate his energies into a
pleasureless life of "duty". The crown could pass to
Andrew Windsor. But, really, won't most people
conclude that it's time to call it a day?

Of course, there is a precedent in living memory for
William's choice. The only voluntary abdication thus
far is that of Edward VIII, but the institution
survived. Yet William's inclinations demonstrate that
if the monarchy continues much longer, it will have to
survive wave after wave of abdications. Even if
William is talked round to being king - a scenario
that I think is seriously unlikely - will his children
be happy to surrender their privacy and their lives?
Will their children?

William's abdication would certainly be lethal for the
monarchy if he accompanied his resignation with a
candid expression of his feelings about the
institution. If he is honest, he will issue a damning
public statement making it clear that raising another
child in the uniquely cruel goldfish bowl of the
British monarchy would be intolerable.

Johann Hari's book God Save the Queen? The Truth About
the Windsors', is published by Icon Books, pounds 6.99

Monarchists claim to love and respect the Queen - yet they snatched her at birth and systematically ruined her life. As we mark 50 years of tormenting her on the throne, it is perhaps time we looked at the damage we have inflicted on Elizabeth Windsor.

There was one, brief period of her life in which she was able to escape the institution into which she was born. When she first married Philip Mountbatten, she travelled to Malta, where she lived from 1950-51 as a comparatively normal Navy wife. Marian Crawford - who, as her nanny, was Elizabeth's de facto mother - explained: "The Princess had no very clear understanding of the way people lived outside palace walls. But when she flew to visit Prince Philip in Malta, she saw and experienced for the first time the life of an ordinary girl not living in a palace."

This period is invariably described by Elizabeth's friends as her happiest time. She could socialise, have tea and generally be an officer's wife around town. She could see the life she might have had, if only the monarchy had not existed. Lady Kennard, a very good friend of Elizabeth's, has said: "I'm quite sure that the first five years they spent together [before Elizabeth became Queen] were the happiest days of their life. The Princess was able to live just like an ordinary naval officer's wife and it was the only time that she lived such a free life."

Her closest friend, Patricia Mountbatten, has explained that being wrenched from this life was "a tragedy . . . From the Queen's point of view it was a disaster that it all [that is to say, becoming monarch] happened so soon". Or, we could add, that it happened at all. It is the monarchists and their demands who wrenched her from this dream world.

Either side of this period of bliss, there is a life of such unmitigated weirdness that we have to look to Michael Jackson, paraded from birth as a performing freak, to find another child who was so ruthlessly pushed into the public eye from infancy. Elizabeth's childhood is invariably presented in monarchist propaganda as a time of unbroken happiness. This is in blatant contradiction of the facts.

As a little girl, Elizabeth witnessed the institution of monarchy reduce her father to a gibbering wreck. The poor man dreaded appearing in public, and suffered from a severe stammer. He hated speaking so much that many people believed he was retarded. When his brother abdicated and it became clear that he would have to be king, he became nearly hysterical. He told the former prime minister Ramsay Macdonald that he was so sickened during the ceremony that he was entirely unaware of what was happening.

What can witnessing all of this have made the young Elizabeth feel about the fate that awaited her? Is it any wonder that, as Lord Strathmore said, the young girl, when she realised that she too would have to suffer in this way, began to "pray for a brother" who would take precedence over her in the succession and save her from becoming monarch?

Elizabeth was strictly instructed not to allow herself to behave like a normal child. Lady Mountbatten reveals that "she was very aware that how she behaved in public was very important. For instance . . . she knew she must try not to cry."

Sealed off from the normal social interaction of school, Elizabeth found it hard to make friends. Crawford describes a "rather special friendship" that she fleetingly formed with the daughter of a neighbour, but this ended when the friend was sent away to school and Elizabeth was left, once more, alone. She has never at any point been able to have a proper friend. One ex-lady-in-waiting told Ben Pimlott, Elizabeth's biographer, that the royals "never have entirely normal relationships. Even your best friends like Porchey ['Lord' Porchester], or oldest courtiers like Martin Charteris, treat you with special courtesy." Patricia Mountbatten has admitted: "I never for a moment forget that she is my sovereign." What a great friendship that must be - and yet it is said to be Elizabeth's closest.

"Duty" was so vehemently drummed into her by her parents that, as Prince Philip once said: "If it was customary to have porridge at every meal, Lilibet [Elizabeth] would have it." Elizabeth was forced to offer up her life for public consumption because she was told that it was her "duty" and that she would be betraying her family, her country and God if she refused.

As if to compound the misery of this uniquely awful childhood, Elizabeth was subjected to systematic and deliberate parental neglect. As with so many victims of poor parenting, she in turn inflicted her experience on her own children. The "requirements of royalty" meant that her parents abandoned their small children for months on end, entrusting them to anonymous nannies. They jetted off to Australia for six months when their child couldn't even talk, and barely recognised her when they returned. If a working-class woman living on a council estate behaved in this way, she would be branded as "the worst mother in Britain", a "home-alone mum", "unfit to raise kids", and so on.

Elizabeth was to continue this tragic cycle and show similar, breathtaking cruelty to her own children. When her eldest son was just three years old, she abandoned him for six months to travel abroad. When she returned to England, she spent four days dealing with paperwork and another day at the races before she deigned to see her child. When finally they were reunited, the tiny boy was forced to wait in line to shake his mother's hand.

Douglas Hurd, who got to know her very well when he was foreign secretary, has commented that Elizabeth's "constitutional machinery" is in tip-top shape, but her "emotional machinery" is almost entirely out of order. The monarchy, not some inbuilt defect, had made her this way. "You see, if you are brought up to live your life in the eyes of the world," Patricia Mountbatten has pointed out, "you can't afford to be seen to be terribly sad, or in tears or cross or even unwell. You have to have such total control over yourself at all times that it then becomes quite difficult to show your emotions, even in private. I think that is a particular thing with the royal family - they cannot be seen to be other than totally composed and in control of the situation in public, and that spills over into their private life."

Lord Charteris, Elizabeth's former private secretary (a man who spent every working day with her for over a decade), said that the key to the Queen's character is that she is "afraid of her emotions". This, he confirms, is a product of her job. One of her most senior ladies-in-waiting told the Telegraph journalist Graham Turner that "the Queen does not like emotion, and for very good reasons".

She went on to explain that, if you showed your emotions, this might spill over into your constitutional role. So, as Hurd, who accompanied Elizabeth on many state visits, explains: "She has almost trained feelings out of herself." We can reasonably conclude that this is an inhuman and cruel job that should go the way of child chimney-sweeps. It should be abolished to preserve the mental health of those involved.

The institution of monarchy directly turned Elizabeth into a bad mother. As Anthony Jay, who scripted the documentary Elizabeth R, explains: "She's one of those people who is deeply unemotional. . . . For people who are emotionally detached in that way, institutions become more important than families. The Queen's children were handed over to nannies, and a kind of emotional cauterisation took place. Something was sealed off very early. For her, that is a strength. If she were emotionally involved, she couldn't do her job."

Some would argue that her job is some compensation. While it is true that she enjoys considerable and real powers, Neil Kinnock - who as leader of the opposition for over a decade saw Elizabeth's work at close hand - gives us a sense of how mind-numbingly boring this work is. He observed that "the great skill the Queen has acquired over the years is to use the word 'fascinating' in about five different tones . . . . What she's developed over the years is the technique of giving evidence of really rapt interest and attention, whilst at the same time being able to slip her mind into neutral."

It is a horrible and miserable existence. Too emotionally crippled to form relationships with her own children, too infused with the arid notion of "duty" to question a marriage that is widely believed to be unsatisfactory, too numbed with boredom to rebel. When I look at Elizabeth Windsor during her golden jubilee celebrations I won't feel pride, nor even red-blooded republican hatred. I will feel nothing but pity.

Johann's Hari's book, God Save the Queen? Monarchy and the Truth about the Windsors, is newly published by Icon Books (£5.99)

April 6, 2003 Sunday

SECTION: Sunday Life; Pg. 28

LENGTH: 850 words

HEADLINE: Off With Our Head

BYLINE: Story By Fred Pawle

BODY:
Britain's royals inspire pity, and that's why their
days in power are numbered.

God Save The Queen?

by Johann Hari is published by Icon, $16.95.

When arguing for a new constitution, republicans have
always been careful not to focus too much on the
incumbent head of state. No offence, ma'am, they have
tended to say, it's the system we object to, not you.
I am not convinced this is entirely true. Republicans
know that to win the debate they must persuade
monarchists that the family they have grown to know
and love must be stripped of its power, if not its
"benign" symbolism. Criticise the royal family
personally, and you've lost the battle before it has
even begun.

I think it is this strategy, not respect for Elizabeth
and her kin, that keeps republicans nice. When former
chairman of the Australian Republican Movement Greg
Barns told a conference at Griffith University last
November that the Queen's intervention in the Paul
Burrell case (in which she halted a criminal trial
that was potentially damaging to the monarchy)
"demonstrated the corrupt nature of the monarchy" and
that the system had become "a menace to democracy",
members of the audience were shocked.

"Some were aghast," says Barns, "as if to say, 'Oh no,
Greg's taken the gloves off.' There's a reluctance to
take on the royal family because there is a reservoir
of strong personal support for the Queen."

God Save The Queen?: Monarchy And The Truth About The
Windsors by British journalist Johann Hari explains
that it is not only acceptable for republicans to form
opinions about the individual royals, it is essential
to an understanding of the system's flaws.

The book is a collection of pocket biographies of the
main family members, gleaned from Hari's research as
well as decades of published interviews, articles and
revelations from palace staff. It would be easy to
assume that an analysis of the royal family by a
republican journalist would be a series of vicious
character assassinations. But it is quite the
opposite. Without the sycophancy expected of those
granted royal access, Hari shows

a compassion for the Windsors that monarchists would
find disturbing.

In fact, this is Hari's main thesis. "Monarchists are
torturing the very people they claim to love and
respect," he writes in his opening essay. Of them all,
Charles receives more of Hari's pity than anyone. He
has become a walking, talking example of how badly a
royal life - one spent waiting for your mum to die so
you can assume her job - can screw you up.

Hari traces Charles's "foolishness" back to such
events as being left by his parents for six months
when he was only four years old; the "appalling
cruelty" of his father, who constantly ridiculed him
as a child in front of friends and family; the
"sadism" of his boarding school, where boys beat him
up for the kudos, or ignored him for fear of appearing
to suck up to him; and the committee that was formed
in 1965 to decide his future (Charles was allowed no
input). The committee decided he should "enter one of
the armed services" - the navy, as it turned out -
after studying at university.

If, like me, you were brought up thinking the Windsors
were made of stern, traditional stuff, you may find
this information unremarkable. But Hari continually
uses non-royal life as a yardstick and, in Charles's
case, also sympathetically points out that the man is
no Rhodes scholar. You or I would not have survived
such a childhood unscathed. Why should Charles?

In other chapters, Hari tries hard to maintain a
lighthearted, mocking tone, but his revulsion often
seeps through. He pities the "inhuman formality"

the royals are forced to endure in childhood, then
castigates them for perpetuating it as adults. In the
chapter about the late Queen Mother, for example, he
says, "We shouldn't be too harsh on her" because
"monarchy damaged [her] by giving her a grotesquely
warped view of Britain and her own privilege". He is
soon, however, referring to her "comically extreme
decadence" and detailing the "deeply unpleasant
aspects of this bitter old woman".

This is republicanism with verve and wit. It should be
embraced by Australians, along with, of course, all
the positive reasons for having one of our own as head
of state. Why such an approach frightens local
republicans is confusing. These should be halcyon days
for the movement. Vanquished and unfashionable,
republicans are free to be ratbags again. Having lost
the first round to fear mongers, they should be
enjoying their new role as hecklers and piss-takers of
a system that even the PM, who has become increasingly
presidential since scuppering the movement, knows is
faulty.

The hiatus won't last long. The next PM is, at most,
only a couple of years away, and he will almost
certainly revive the debate, plunging it back into
technicalities about models and such. In the meantime,
republicans should admit they secretly think that
Elizabeth is manipulative, greedy and - shocking to
admit - a snob, that Charles is a buffoon, and that we
deserve better.

There, that was easy, wasn't it?

Copyright 2003 Newspaper Publishing PLC
The Independent (London)

March 12, 2003, Wednesday

SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 17

LENGTH: 1252 words

HEADLINE: PRINCE CHARLES, A VICTIM OF MONARCHISTS'
CRUELTY;
BECAUSE OF THE SILLINESS OF MONARCHY, HE HAS
REPEATEDLY BEEN PLACED

BYLINE: JOHANN HARI

BODY:
Republicans are often accused of hating the Royal
Family, while monarchists claim they "love" Elizabeth
and Charles Windsor. Yet, in truth, it is the
monarchists who are putting the Windsors through hell
and we republicans who want to set them free to live a
normal life. When the in-house investigation into the
on-going farce at St James's Palace is released
tomorrow, we will all be provided with another vivid
illustration of this.

All the available evidence suggests that Charles
Windsor is an unintelligent man who, in a kinder
world, would not be placed in a managerial role of any
kind. So, of course, the monarchists' decision to put
him in charge of more than 300 servants where he can
rule unchallenged - indeed, where everybody tells him
how jolly clever and good all his ideas are - has
ended in disaster.

Tomorrow's report will contain only the barest minimum
that has been allowed by the Palace to slip out. The
"investigation" has been led by Sir Michael Peat,
Charles Windsor's private secretary, and he declared
before he even began looking into the affair that on
Charles's part, "no impropriety has taken place". It
is as though Tony Blair announced an investigation
into himself by Alastair Campbell. Bear this in mind
when you read the details: however superficially tough
the report might seem, the reality will have been far
more chaotic.

Because of the irrational nature of monarchy, Charles
has been placed repeatedly - and pitilessly - in
situations like this. Despite the best education money
can buy, he achieved derisory A-level results, but was
still admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, solely
because of who his mother was. Predictably, his degree
was a belly-flop. He then went on to be almost
comically incompetent in the navy. He couldn't master
navigation for the life of him (a pretty fundamental
skill when you're at sea), but equally the authorities
couldn't punish his failures in the way they would
with anybody else. As the Naval Secretary to the
Ministry of Defence wrote: "The thought of Court
Martialling the heir to the throne for a navigational
error is good nightmare material." In the end, he had
to be given multiple intensive courses until
eventually he was receiving one-to-one tuition. Like
Forrest Gump, he has wandered through life inadequate
at everything, yet being lauded as though he were
able.

Charles himself is not to blame. This is all the fault
of the ridiculous institution of monarchy that has
denied him the opportunity to find a job that suits
his limited talents: working as a gardener, perhaps.
(Charles is a horrible symbol of the fact that in
addition to having very limited upward class mobility,
we have almost no downward class mobility at all. In a
meritocracy, he would probably fail - but instead,
class ringfences him from that possibility). No wonder
Charles is deluded. A friend of his told the gossip
columnist Nigel Dempster that "he lives in an
isolation ward of flattery. He goes to Hollywood and
is told he's handsome. He swaps jokes with a comic
genius like Peter Sellers and the other Goons, and
they fall down laughing. He boffs a woman once, and
she tells him he's the greatest lover she's ever had
... The best education in the world can't defend you
against sycophancy on that scale." This process -
which is inherent to the cruel institution of monarchy
- has warped Charles in innumerable ways, as it would
any of us.

But, I hear you cry, doesn't Charles make learned
speeches to academic audiences? Didn't he deliver one
of the Reith lectures? How can he be stupid? Yet our
soon-to-be-emperor has no intellectual clothes.
Everything he touches - from his unsuccessful "model
villages" to his personal staff - swiftly falls apart.
His speeches are, by and large, cobbled-together
nonsense received with a politeness based on his
position rather than their quality. Even Charles's
closest aides admit that all too often he simply
spouts whatever the last person to whisper in his ear
has said. His very sympathetic biographer Jonathan
Dimbleby admits that his aides "were uncomfortable
with his tendency to reach instant conclusions on the
basis of insufficient thought". Edward Adeane,
Charles's private secretary for many years, was deeply
disturbed by the fact that "Charles was
extraordinarily easy to lead by the nose". These are
understatements.

The quality of his judgement can be seen in the
mentors he has chosen for himself throughout his life.
Look, for example, at the late Laurens van der Post.
Charles revered Van der Post as a guru. He wined and
dined him, and made great efforts to boost Van der
Post's public standing, and even chose him as
William's godfather. As Van der Post's distinguished
official biographer JDF Jones puts it: "For 20 years,
they shared the most intimate conversations and
correspondence. Charles even told him about his
dreams." Yet Van der Post was, as Jones says, "a
compulsive fantasist". He intoxicated Charles with his
tales of the "noble savages" who lived in the
Kalahari. These condescending myths had long since
been discredited by anthropologists (something Charles
really ought to have known since he studied the
subject, at least nominally, at university), but Van
der Post repeated them as though they reflected his
own experiences. He went even further with this
quackery and convinced Charles that the Old Man of
Lochnagar, a fictional character Charles had created
when he was 20 in a story for his little brothers, was
Charles's "guru" inherited through the ages and
embedded in Charles's "collective unconscious". Most
people spotted that Van der Post was a charlatan at 50
paces; Charles lapped up this gibberish.

Yet the monarchists still encourage the exploitation
of Charles by people like this. It is Charles who
suffers, because he is allowed to entertain delusions
about his own intellect. When it was revealed last
year that Charles bombards busy government ministers
with his incoherent ramblings - and becomes extremely
petulant if they do not respond promptly - they said
that he was "performing his civil duty". His office
announced that he "will not be diverted from using the
authority of his position to speak out across a range
of public issues". But what authority does his
position have? Why on earth should a hereditary
position have any authority at all? To allow him to
entertain this belief is to encourage madness.

We even allow him to display hypocrisy on a staggering
scale without positing out that he is making himself
into a national joke. Remember: this is a man who
preaches fuel conservation yet drives one of the
greatest fuel-wasters in the world, a Bentley - or
rather, three of them. This is a man who took a trip
to the USA to inspect urban slums and spent half the
trip playing polo. This is a man who preaches about
agricultural traditionalism but was quite happy to
shut down his own "model farms" so that he could make
an extra few quid by "rationalising" the Duchy of
Cornwall.

The revelations tomorrow will just be another reminder
that monarchy has placed Charles Windsor in a
situation for which he is entirely unsuitable. How
could genes determine your suitability to be head of
state? It is time to end the cruelty of the
monarchists and release Charles to live in the
countryside he loves and marry Camilla without
fretting about the Church of England - and to
introduce a sensible way of selecting our future head
of state. Elections, anyone?

johann@johannhari.com

Copyright 2003 The Southland Times Company Limited
The Southland Times (New Zealand)

January 11, 2003, Saturday

SECTION: FEATURES; BOOKS; Pg. 26

LENGTH: 290 words

HEADLINE: Raising questions about the monarchy

BODY:
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN, by Johann Hari, Icon Books, $
19.95.

THE image of the British monarchy has become somewhat
tarnished in recent years. The public is seemingly
seeing and hearing of behaviour that is supposed to
only be seen in the lower classes. Eh, what old chap?
Johann Hari has transformed our view of the monarchy.

With 80 percent of British people supporting the
monarchy, Hari shows that Prince William and Prince
Harry are part of the 20 percent longing for a
Republic of Britain.

God Save the Queen shows how the royals have been
broken and destroyed by the institution they were born
into.

Hari describes the dysfunction of the family. If
anyone other than a royal behaved towards their
children the way the royals do, they would have their
children taken off them, according to Hari. Each
generation has treated their children appallingly bad.
Rarely has any affection been shown.

The way the members have been treated has
significantly influenced their adult behaviour.

Before the 1980s, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip
boasted about their unity as a family and their role
as a "moral example to the nation." Hari includes
stories about Philip's friendship with other women and
how their poor, desperate children had been virtually
abandoned as babies.

Princess Diana's marriage was doomed to failure before
she married Prince Charles.

She knew she was competing with another women and was
thrown in front of the never-ending paparazzi cameras.

The amazing thing about the monarchy is that the
taxpayer cops most of the cost and that the royals do
nothing in the way of work to earn the money.

Johann Hari argues that it is time this tragicomic
show closed. An excellent read.

Ken Mackay

LOAD-DATE: January 14, 2003

The Monarchy Must Go
God save the Queen? Monarchy and the Truth about the Windsors. Johann Hari. Icon Books

This book is shockingly rude and intemperate and I believe every word.

Johann Hari articulates what a lot of people know, but never say, at least in mainstream newspapers and journals. He pulls no punches. This is no measured, objective analysis: it's a rave, born of frustration and anger.

Johann Hari says the British monarchy must go. Why? Not just because of the obscene waste of public money, but because the monarchy has systematically wrecked the lives of every member of the Windsor family so far.

Adulation, isolation, lies and extreme wealth are an unlikely culture in which to breed happy humans. Add democracy, the cult of stars, and a swarm of paparazzi to the petri dish, and misery is automatically created.

Hari says it is impossible to be a member of the royal family and be a happy, normal human being.

None of his devastating conclusions seems in the least bit forced to me. There's a horrible logic to his argument as he heaps fact upon fact.

William privately swears he will never be King. Harry says the same. They're the only sane Windsors left, and only because they are still too young to have been ruined.

Here's Hari's portrait of the Queen: a domestic despot, a cold mother, married to a brazen adulterer, with no sincere and honest friends apart from her dogs.

Hari says she was not born that way. The monarchy made her that way.

Lately, Charles' habit of lobbying the Prime Minister with his personal agenda has become public knowledge. That's the least of our problems with the monarchy, but still, it is irrational and potentially dangerous.

I'm glad I read this scary little book.

© 2002 Rachel McAlpine

Copyright 2002 Illawarra Newspapers Holdings Pty Ltd
Illawarra Mercury (Australia)

October 5, 2002 Saturday

SECTION: Weekender; Pg. 6

LENGTH: 907 words

HEADLINE: Ma'am Is The Word

BYLINE: Glen Humphries

BODY:
Affairs, drunkenness, abject stupidity and
unbelievable cruelty ... the House of Windsor has it
all, according to a new book. GLEN HUMPHRIES reports.

IMAGINE a woman who leaves her three-year-old son
behind when she decides to spend six months travelling
the world.

Now, imagine that, when the mother returns home, she
spends four days catching up on some work and another
day at the races before she finally decides to see her
own son.

What do you call a woman like that?

Well, we call her the Queen of England.

Yes, the person some hold up as the epitome of
womanhood actually treated her own son with such
disdain.

And it gets worse still. When her son - who was Prince
Charles - finally did get the chance to see his mum,
he was forced to wait in line to shake his mother's
hand.

No hug, no kiss on the cheek. Just a handshake.

Johann Hari's book God Save The Queen? is full of
stories like that about the royal family. Affairs,
drunkenness, abject stupidity, wasteful lifestyles,
unbelievable cruelty; it's all there.

But Hari's aim is not to attack the royals - he
actually doesn't blame them at all for the way they
are.

The way he sees it, anyone growing up within the
monarchy is bound to become a seriously warped
individual.

"I don't actually blame them for the fact that they're
quite unpleasant people," Hari says.

"If I was in their position, if I was constantly
surrounded by sycophants who tell you you're
wonderful...you're going to become really weird and
very selfish and self-obsessed."

Hari's views are such that he believes he has the best
interests of the royal family as human beings at
heart. And it's hard to disagree with him.

"Everyone says 'republicans hate the royal family',"
he says.

"It seems to me monarchists are the people who hate
them. They're the people who want to imprison them,
give them absolutely no freedom, not allow them to
choose their own job or what they want to do with
their lives.

"I want to set the Windsor family free to do whatever
they want to do with their lives."

That monarchy is a very constricting institution - the
members of it cannot choose their own job, who they
want to marry, how they want to worship and other
freedoms we take for granted.

And yet, monarchists do not seem to see anything wrong
in sentencing these people to such a terrible fate.

Hari, a journalist at the New Statesman, decided to
write the book after the magazine published his cover
story rumouring that Prince William didn't want to be
king.

Some time later, he met one of Will's drunk friends at
a party. With his lips a little loosened by alcohol,
he asked Hari how he knew Will would refuse to accept
the crown.

From there he knew the monarchy was something worth
looking at.

"It will turn them into monsters," he says.

"Prince Charles is a grotesque figure and it's not his
fault. This poor old man, who really isn't very bright
and doesn't have any particular ability, has convinced
himself that he has these incredibly profound ideas,
when actually they're incredibly ignorant and
ill-informed.

"If it weren't for the fact of who his mother is, his
ideas would never be listened to."

As you can see by the opening paragraphs to this
story, his mother doesn't fare too well either.

"The whole institution has turned her into this
freakish, bizarre woman," he says.

"She can't get along with her kids, she can't relate
to anyone in a normal human way.

"What kind of warped view of reality must you get if
you're the Queen and everyone you ever meet is all
deferential even though you haven't done anything?"

As far as not doing anything, Hari points out the much
beloved Queen Mother, who died earlier this year aged
101, was the leader.

Even the much told tale about her staying in London
during the Blitz in World War II isn't true.

"They spent much of their time in Windsor, which
wasn't being bombed," he says, while agreeing the
Queen Mum did have an effect on morale regardless.

"All that stuff about how they stuck to their rations,
it's a myth. They had all their food from their
estates, with their hunting. They weren't living on a
normal person's diet, it's just not true."

As Hari points out, take this greatly exaggerated
achievement out, there's not much left. Except for the
drinking and the gambling.

"If a working-class woman behaved like the Queen Mum,
first of all, she'd be a terrible mother and have her
children taken into care," he says.

"Secondly, if all she did was scrounge off the state,
gamble and drink, the tabloids would go mad.

"With the Queen Mum, they try and turn it into virtue.
'God bless her, she likes a bit of a gamble, she likes
a drink'.

"Yes, she's an alcoholic and that's sad, but it's not
something to admire."

In Hari's eyes, virtually the only royals who seemed
to have turned out relatively normal were Princess
Diana and her two sons.

And he thinks those two sons can spell the end of the
monarchy.

"I think it will collapse because the individuals
involved are not going to effectively give up their
lives for some nasty little institution that doesn't
actually achieve anything," he says.

"I think, if William and Harry say, 'look, I'm not
doing it because it's not fair and I don't want that
done to my kids', then I think people will begin to
ask, 'is this an institution that's really sustainable
anymore?'."

God Save The Queen? by Johann Hari is published by
Allen and Unwin, RRP $16.95.

Copyright 2002 Arena Printing and Publications Pty.
Ltd.
Arena Magazine

October 1, 2002

SECTION: Pg. 43; ISSN: 1039-1010

IAC-ACC-NO: 93448448

LENGTH: 802 words

HEADLINE: Johann Hari God Save the Queen? Monarchy and
the Truth about the Windsors; Book Review

BYLINE: McCarthy, Elizabeth

BODY:
Whilst main players in the local Republican debate
continue to flagellate each other over the recent
failure to behead the seriously suspect office of
Governor-General, British journalist Johann Hari
undercuts these residual blame games with an
enchanting, boisterous read that provides further
sound argument for the forced removal of the House of
Windsor.

Hari reinvigorates the Republican wrangle via a
psychotherapeutic approach--albeit of the popular,
do-it-yourself variety--that rigorously examines the
Windsor family itself. We are guided through the
Windsors' peculiar brand of monstrous personality
disorder yielded through decades of systematic
parental neglect, rapturous public fawning and highly
financed joblessness. Yet before sympathy overwhelms,
Hari rebukes us, and occasionally himself, by
demonstrating how alternately spoilt, deluded and
ungrateful this sorry household of misfits is. For
this is a bewildering tale of royals and royalists
promoting faith in democracy's shoddiest, most
non-democratic job description. What transpires is a
worthy entry point for a different slant on our
homegrown Republican debate. Hari accosts readers with
a fresh slap in the face that asks, how have we
allowed the Windsors to get away with this
undemocratic stranglehold on democracy for so long?

God Save the Queen? commences with the assertion that
William is a Republican. This seems dubious; he
apparently yearns to live the 'carefree decadent
aristocratic lifestyle of his friends', surely a
capricious notion that doesn't exactly entail handing
royal wealth back to the public, or circling
Situations Vacant adverts in an effort to find a
'real' job. What is quite clear, however, is that
neither William nor Harry harbours a desire to become
King. The two privately dread the social barriers of
titles, procedure and duty, and view the press as
murderers, an opinion that could render the monarchy
unworkable. Hari presents William and Harry as
survivors of a royal rearing who narrowly escaped the
personality dysfunction afflicting their relatives
because Diana showed genuine physical affection and
care toward them. It would seem in their best interest
to quit the firm sooner rather than later, for the
monarchy has a history of inducing irreversible
curvature of the human spirit on anyone who spends
even a relatively short time in its clutches.

To prove this point, Hari indulges us with a catalogue
of bad behaviour that would sell more magazines than
the weekly update of Diana's inspirational blow-wave
ever did. Here are some nasties: Sarah Ferguson
insisted her own father curtsey to her; Diana suffered
limelight deprivation syndrome during the Falklands
War; the Queen Mother was an alcoholic who paid her
eighty-three staff a pittance whilst viewing her own
gambling and wastefulness as a patriotic duty;
Margaret expected appearance fees at charity events;
Philip has regular appointments with other women for
sex; Elizabeth retaliates by consistently refusing to
make him her official consort; apart from William and
Harry, they all insist everyone address them by royal
title; and Philip, Charles and Andrew want a pay hike.
Royal pains in the public purse, indeed.

But let's not allow these deliciously obscene tales of
royal spoils and greed distract from the real issue
that Hari argues: that the monarchy disturbs and
disfigures democracy--that power is seen as something
which flows down from above, rather than upwards, from
the people. Hari drives this point by demonstrating
that the Queen, far from being content to publicly
regurgitate the word 'fascinating' in a tone that
doesn't betray hyper-boredom, is in fact a key
political player. Her weekly meetings with Tony Blair
consist of more than tea and meteorological
observations, and those whose very careers she can
impact upon regard the monarch's political opinions
extremely seriously. Hari provides evidence of how
royal political bias almost imported fascism to
Britain via Edward VIII, and that Charles' incredulity
at not seeing his harebrained 'blueprints' for pet
projects adopted as official government policy has
caused enormous financial wastage.

Hari makes a compelling case that monarchy is an
institution inflicting abuse not only on democracy,
but also on the Windsors themselves, denying them
religious, political, and sexual freedoms that even
their most strident supporters enjoy. The Windsors
present as a family that revel in their exalted status
yet complain of the restrictions such status affords.
Hari reveals an affluenzic clan that regards itself
superior to its subjects, one we should surely view as
too incompetent and dangerous for and ultimately
inferior to modern democracy.

Elizabeth McCarthy is a Melbourne writer, broadcaster
and receptionist.

Observations on Prince Charles by Johann Hari
In the mid-1990s, the novelist Michael Dobbs predicted a clash between a left-wing, environmentalist Prince of Wales and a nasty, right-wing Tory government. Nearly a decade later, a more predictable - and more disturbing - conflict has been exposed at the heart of our unwritten constitution.

Charles Windsor's persistent lobbying and harassment of ministers in favour of his own right-wing causes is at last being publicly acknowledged. He is such a notorious political infighter that Michael Heseltine told him he had "all the hallmarks of a seasoned politician". One former minister, Peter Morrison, has recounted how Charles called him into Kensington Palace, screamed and banged his fist on the table when Morrison wouldn't accept his arguments.

Tory ministers more often than not allowed themselves to be bullied by Charles. But now the war between Downing Street and Highgrove is plain for all to see.

Many on the left had taken Charles as something of a sympathiser, primarily because of his resistance to GM crops. Yet Charles is, in fact, part of the oldest of the old right: he is, as the Labour peer and Blair confidant Lord Haskins astutely observed earlier this year, a feudal thinker.

Charles, as he accepted the cheers of the jubilee crowd in June, ranted against "the poison of change": he is a nostalgist for a premodern world where everybody knew their place in the hierarchy of nature. (Hence his resistance to GM foods.) This is also why he was such a tireless promoter of the now-discredited Laurens van der Post, a compulsive fantasist and liar. Van der Post exalted "primitive" peoples who lived without the "encumbrance of science or Enlightenment rationalism". This is a pre-rational philosophy for a man at the head of a pre-rational institution.

Downing Street has been extraordinarily accommodating towards Charles. During the foot-and-mouth crisis, he spoke to the Prime Minister daily to lobby for vaccination. Charles has even been named a government "design tsar", giving him the power to stamp his "vision" of classical architecture on Britain's new hospitals. This is despite there being no evidence that the Prince, who has a degree in history, has any special skills in the subject.

Charles has not responded with gratitude but with persistent anti-government leaks. He has said that he will not be diverted from using "the authority of his position" to speak out across a range of public issues. He does not seem to question his conviction that a hereditary position should have any "authority" at all.

As Charles steps up his campaigning against Blair - allowing the Tory MP Nicholas Soames to draft his complaints, writing to the Lord Chancellor to complain about new Labour's political correctness - perhaps even the pro-monarchy PM will lose patience and start questioning Charles's suitability for the throne.

Charles should proceed with caution. Remember: this is a man who preaches fuel conservation yet drives one of the greatest fuel-wasters in the world, a Bentley - or rather, three of them. This is a man who took a trip to the US to inspect urban slums and spent half his time there playing polo; a man who preaches agricultural traditionalism but was happy to shut down his own "model farms" so that he could make an extra few quid by "rationalising" the Duchy of Cornwall.

As Francis Urquhart warns the king in Michael Dobbs's novel To Play the King: "Those who live in glass palaces would be well-advised not to throw stones."

One man has the power to bring the British monarchy to the brink of destruction. No, not our best republican journalist Jonathan Freedland, nor our best republican rabble-rouser Tony Benn, nor even our constitutional moderniser Tony Blair. The man who might finally herald the Republic of Britain is a 19-year-old named William Mountbatten-Windsor - or, as the history books might record him, William the Last.

At the dawn of the Queen's Golden Jubilee year, marking 50 years of her public service, William's reluctance to be King is in tune with many of his subjects. A recent Observer/YouGov poll revealed that 38 per cent of Britons want the Queen to abdicate at some point in the future, most think royal perks should be curbed, and more than a third think the £8.9m civil list should be axed.

The first piece of evidence that Wills did not want to go into the family business comes straight from his late mother's mouth. In a book about the Windsors, Jennie Bond, the BBC's royal correspondent, reports a conversation with Diana shortly before her death. Diana talked about the pain of losing her royal title, and how her son tried to comfort her, telling her that she was "very lucky to be able to give up the HRH". The clear implication is that William would like to give it up, too.

This hint is much more extensively corroborated in an authoritative new book, Diana's Boys by Christopher Andersen, a widely respected contributing editor of Time magazine. After interviewing friends of Diana's, Andersen reports that, on more than one tearful occasion, William insisted he did not want to be King. Diana would tell friends that "William is waiting patiently for the monarchy to be abolished". William once told Charles that perhaps he would "go backpacking in Nepal and never come back".

This wasn't just adolescent petulance. William should have become His Royal Highness Prince William of Wales on his 18th birthday. In a move that was little noticed at the time, he refused point blank to accept the title. According to the journalist and royal expert Nicholas Davies, during one holiday in his mid-teens, William was tobogganing down a steep hill in the dark. When he neared the bottom of the slope where cars were passing, a detective leapt out, seemingly from nowhere, threw himself on the sledge and hurled William into a heap of snow. William screamed: "Why do I have to be surrounded by policemen all the time? Why won't you let me be a normal person?"

It's a good question: why won't we let him be a normal person? We certainly could: constitutionally, the throne could pass, after his father, to his younger brother, Harry, who seems much happier in the limelight. Yet William's pre-emptive abdication would deliver a clear blow to the monarchy. If he accompanied his resignation with a damning public statement making it clear that raising another child in the uniquely cruel goldfish bowl of the British monarchy would be intolerable, he could bankrupt the entire "Royal Firm" for ever.

If you think this is an unlikely scenario, try to imagine the life we know he has been forced to lead. Wherever William goes, an armed private detective is, at most, 50 yards behind. The prince has recently been the target of militant Scottish nationalist groups, who have even threatened an anthrax attack on St Andrew's University. So long as he is a royal, he will remain a target for the Real IRA, al-Qaeda and all other enemies of the British state. He has never known the pleasure of being truly alone, free to make his own private decisions. As a royal, he never will.

It could all be so different for him. Unlike previous royals, William has an immense personal fortune totally unconnected to his royal status. No matter how rich Prince Charles seems to be, if he gave up his connections to the "Firm", there would be a huge conflict over whether he owned any of it. He could never quit in the certain knowledge that he would remain a rich man. Thanks to Diana, William is in a very different position, sitting on a cool £8m in the bank. He could live a private life of luxury far away from the windy palaces of Britain. Indeed, all of his life choices so far indicate that he wants to live the carefree, decadent aristocratic lifestyle of his friends. He wanted to spend his gap year playing polo in Argentina. Instead, he was forced by his father (and a committee including Chris Patten and the Bishop of London who convened to "discuss" his gap year) to choose a more media-friendly project.

William need only look at his parents to see the poisonous effects of monarchy upon the individuals involved. His father, Charles Windsor, has spent his life preparing for a job that he is highly unlikely to get until he is elderly (the Queen is reported to be implacably opposed to abdicating, ever). He has been unable to find a meaningful job in the areas that clearly interest him - architecture, say, or politics. Instead, he is condemned to trail behind his mother. He spends his days surrounded by sycophants and is denied the dignity of marrying the woman he so clearly loves, forced to monitor opinion polls to see if he can be seen with her in public. Is it any surprise that, as Andersen tells us, William asked when he was 15: "Mummy, do I really have to be part of this family?"

We can only imagine the effect on the pubescent William, at an age when any mention of our parents' sexuality sends us into paroxysms of embarrassment, of having to learn every detail of his own father's sexual life, including his fantasy about being a tampon.

Then there is Diana, the ghost at every royal feast. It is a moot point whether the press directly killed his mother; it is beyond dispute, however, that the media destroyed her life. At her funeral, William joined in the ovation for his uncle's damning attack on those who had "hounded" Diana to her death, while the Queen sat in silence.

We know that many, many times it fell to William to comfort his mother after she had been harassed by the paparazzi. While holidaying with her in Lech in 1995, William reacted with fury when a group of photographers broke an agreement that they would take no more photographs of Diana that day. He had an aggressive altercation with them and threatened to take their cameras away. The situation was resolved only after a personal detective reasoned with the prince and secured a promise from the photographers that they would leave. An even more striking episode happened while William was on holiday with his mother in the south of France in 1996. Unfortunately, the villa could be seen from woods about 200 yards away, a public place from which photographers could spy on their every move. William became so determined not to give anything at all to the photographers that he refused to leave the villa at all during daylight hours. After several days of this, the holiday was cut short and they returned to London.

Even in his 18th birthday press interview, William was at pains to point out that he felt "uncomfortable with it". According to reputable sources, Diana said that "he hates the press even more than I did when I first got into this family. He sees them as the enemy."

Yet what is the monarchy now, if not a ceaseless media roadshow, selling nothing but itself? How can the royal family exist in the public consciousness, if not through the flashbulbs and omnipresent cameras? A prince who hates the press is a prince who cannot do his job.

And the removal of his privacy is not the only problem William has to endure. Suppose that, while at university, William experiments with, say, different faiths. Suppose that, like his mother, he begins to see the appeal of Islam. Suppose he wants to embrace Hinduism, or Scientology, or - heaven forbid - atheism. What then? He was born to be the head of the Church of England. So we rob him of one of the most basic human rights: religious freedom.

That still isn't enough, though. We've taken his privacy and control his beliefs, but we want another pound of flesh, too. There are whole websites dedicated to the belief that William is gay. It has to be said that they seem to rely more on daydreams and his pretty eyelashes than on any evidence, but what if they are right? Could William have a gay partner as royal consort? You can imagine the Sun headline: "Two Queens at the Palace."

A straight William would not be much better off. According to the reputable end of the US press, several government agencies monitor, for "security purposes", any girls in which William expresses an interest. One paper quoted "a former member of parliament with close ties to the palace" who said that, after all the scandalous headlines, "the Queen pays very close attention to the girls in William's life" to avoid "another Diana or Fergie". Can you think of anything more hideous for a young lad than for his granny to be vetting his shags?

Or what if William finds himself passionately attracted to politics? He can never speak out on political issues. So William is asked to give up his privacy, his sexual, religious and political freedom, any career he might want to pursue, any life he might lead - and for what? For the glory of one day being King? A glory that consists of, um, unveiling statues and chuntering about in carriages, waving like a buffoon to an increasingly resentful and chippy public? Would you do it?

What will ultimately destroy the monarchy is not republi- canism (although that will help). No, it is the sheer inhumanity of monarchy in a celebrity-obsessed, 24-hour media culture. Prince William, conscious of the effect this voyeurism had on his mother, may well choose to walk away before the press can argue that, like Diana, he's "asking for it", "thrusting himself into the limelight" or "loving the attention". As it stands, he can make an unimpeachable case that he deserves to be left alone.

In time, if he quit, he would fade into the obscurity enjoyed by other celebrities' children (such as Ronald Reagan's and Jane Wyman's), and would be able to pursue a career and a life he wanted. But the clock is ticking on that option, and all the evidence suggests William knows it, too.