He might be thrillingly Paxmanesque when interviewing politicians but, by his own admission, Paxo turns into a clothcap-wringing, curtsying supplicant in the company of royalty – people who, unlike Paxo’s usual victims, are unelected, unaccountable and unremovable. And one can assume that a weekend with Prince Charles (not to mention an audience with Prince Phillip and a lunch with Diana) may have compromised his usual truculence, leading to this qualified defence of constitutional monarchy.
Still, Paxman’s salty tone certainly ruffles a few ostrich feathers. Exploring royal history, Paxman marshals his secondary sources brilliantly, and his best lines tend to be other people’s, like GB Shaw’s ‘kings are not born, they are made by artificial hallucination’, or Ian Jack’s belief that Diana’s death encouraged ‘recreational grieving’, or AJP Taylor’s assertion that Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria’s only sensible remark was ‘I’m the Emperor and I want dumplings’. Paxman finds comic gold in the early twentieth century, when creaky European empires were scurrying around to find heirs (Albania put an ad in The Times and ended up with a tramp called Aubrey Herbert). And the final chapter is a juicy compendium of gossip and hearsay about Prince Charles.
Sadly, Paxman divulges little from his primary sources. He glosses over his weekend at Sandringham (we long to hear the anecdote hinted at on p291 about the Prince, Barry Humphries, David Hockney and ‘the lefties’). We get the Duke of Edinburgh, indistinguishable from his ‘Spitting Image’ puppet, grumbling about Diana, the permissive society and Rupert Murdoch before – hilariously – berating modern society for ‘rudeness’. And Paxman does discover a revealing bookshelf at Sandringham where well-thumbed novels by Dick Francis, PG Wodehouse and Frederick Forsyth mingle with highbrow philosophy texts – the latter all turn out to be fake bookends. He concludes that Royal philistinism gives them ‘much in common with their people, who tend to consider intellectuals in much the same way as they regard people who claim they can levitate’. It’s a pity that Paxo seems to approve of this.
