The Man Who Shouldn't Rule

By Martha Duffy

- For the monarchy, Prince Charles' TV confession was a fiasco. It's hard to fathom how the embattled heir to the throne could replay 1992, the year his mother called her annus horribilis, but he has managed it. The tattle about his relationship with the married -- and Roman Catholic -- Camilla Parker Bowles had died down, but the scandal is back on the front page. Charles also showed a blithe disregard for his nation's constitution in revealing that he wants the coronation oath changed so he can be defender of all faiths, not just the Church of England -- breaking a 460-year tradition. He found it "absurd" that a royal cannot marry a Catholic. He may have a point, but with Parker Bowles in the background, he was foolhardy.

"Never complain, never explain," counseled Disraeli. Not Charles' motto. He is undermining the monarchy at a delicate time. His mother, an exemplary Queen, has hacked the sums paid to her relatives in return for their public engagements. She is giving up the yacht Britannia and paying for various other transport arrangements formerly supported by the public. Britain's economic woes partly account for these cutbacks, but the decline in royal popularity is also a factor: the Queen was reportedly shocked by her subjects' hostility to paying for repairs to Windsor Castle after a fire in November 1992.

Elizabeth may be the last irreproachable monarch -- perhaps the last viable one. Some earlier rulers have been reprobates, but by custom, the press protected them. Now royals are the cannon fodder in media wars, as the Prince of Wales found out when his puerile but genuinely intimate telephone talk with Parker Bowles -- the infamous "Tampax tapes" -- was leaked.

Even Charles' foes acknowledge that he is not a villain, but he seems to have a self-destructive streak. Some of it is just banana-peel comedy. The day of the broadcast he plowed the plane he was piloting off the runway: he misjudged his landing approach. More serious is his capacity for ill-advised self-revelation, which raises the question of whether he is fit to rule. When he claimed he was faithful to Princess Diana until the marriage was "irretrievably broken," he may have opened himself to the charge of lying. The next day Andrew Morton, the author of Diana, Her True Story, wrote a stinging rebuttal. He asserts that the Camilla affair goes back perhaps even to the time of the royal wedding. In the past, Morton has proved to be witheringly right. If the monarchy stands for anything, it is for moral standards.

At a time when Charles' judgment is being questioned, why announce a willingness to tinker with the constitution, the unwritten "document" that is the foundation of his country's culture? The official church is woven deeply into it, and his statement about changing the oath he will someday take caused immediate expressions of concern from several scholars. But the sharpest reaction came from acid-tongued leftist Tony Benn, who intoned, "If the Prince of Wales is moving one brick, you cannot be surprised if the building tumbles." Then he threw in a threat: if Charles persists in his course, Benn will use his position as a member of the Privy Council to veto the prince's accession. Many politicians less flamboyant than he may start examining such tactical possibilities.

In the program, Charles bemoaned the impudent incursions of the press -- though the royals are dependent on it. He griped about his job. Not only is this unseemly, it invites a flip riposte: if the job is such a drag, go back to farming, and let's call the monarchy off. This is no way to run a family business, and the time for royal self-indulgence has long since passed.