Royalty's Recourse

In Great Britain, where purveyors to Her Majesty supply the royal household with everything from Scotch to kilts, Canadian-born Lord Beaverbrook and his three newspapers have provided an .unwelcome oversupply of at least one commodity: criticism. Beaverbrook's papers (Daily Express, Sunday Express, Evening Standard}, with a combined circulation of 8,800,000, have taken the royal family to task for spending too much money, sniped at Prince Philip for churlishness, and gleefully taken off after those natural targets, Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones. John Gordon, editor and crusty columnist of the Sunday Express, congratulated Prince Philip, when the Queen was about to give birth to Prince Andrew, "on being able at last to leave his bird shooting at Sandringham and rejoin his wife at this exciting moment of her life." Last January he announced acidly that "Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon leave for a holiday in the West Indies to recover from the strain of their almost workless year."

Royalty is supposed to ignore such outbursts--but standing on dignity has grown increasingly uncomfortable for Prince Philip, who does not like newsmen anyway (he once kicked one), and has become highly sensitive to the Beaverbrook press's constant highlighting of the expenses of his trips. Last week the prince blew up. At a press reception in Rio de Janeiro in the midst of a Latin American tour, he collared a reporter from the Daily Express. Said the prince: "The Daily Express is a bloody awful newspaper. It is full of lies, scandal and imagination. It is a vicious newspaper." On the Ramparts. To Philip's immediate defense sprang the Conservative Member of Parliament from Solihull, Sir Martin Lindsay. A sheaf of papers in his hand and blood in his eye, Sir Martin accused the Beaverbrook papers of conducting "a sustained vendetta" against Britain's royal family, moved that the House of Commons censure Lord Beaverbrook for "authorizing over the last few years in the newspapers controlled by him more than 70 adverse comments on members of the royal family, who have no means of replying." Lord Beaverbrook was quick to mount the ramparts. His Daily Express pointed out that the royal family indeed had means of replying: "Prince Philip showed well enough in his way that he can look after himself." But Philip's remarks ("bloody" is a curse word in Britain), said the Express, "were ill-mannered," and his reputation "must inevitably suffer in consequence." As for Sir Martin, his complaints were "silly and ignorant." Buckshot for Royalty. Sir Martin got little support for his censure petition in Parliament; and Fleet Street's other newspapers, while crowing at the Beaverbrook predicament, could ill afford to be too righteous in their condemnations--especially after the peevish chorus they had sung when Antony Armstrong-Jones took a job with the Sunday Times. The unwritten rule that the royal family should be treated only with reverence and respect in print has long vanished, and the British press has recently enjoyed peppering journalistic buckshot through the royal carcasses. Henry VIII might have solved such a problem by beheading the critics--a solution the Daily Express lampooned in a sly Giles cartoon (see cut). It is a measure of monarchy's waning power that in modern England a prince's only recourse is to lose his temper.

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