A.N. WILSON: The Royal Family has become a ridiculous soap opera we’re all hooked on. This is why I do have sympathy for Prince Harry – but Andrew and Fergie’s guzzling and fornication are beyond belief

Watching the King speaking on TV about his cancer treatment, urging the rest of us to get checked, was a moving experience. In the past, we were taught to look to the Royal Family as if they were perfect. When their imperfections began to show, we were upset and that, perhaps, explains why so many of us over the years have been critical of Charles, whose imperfections are many.

But the Channel 4 broadcast earlier this month was magnificent. In the past, the royals never mentioned their illnesses. Royals did not have illnesses until they were actually dead. And here was an old man, with great sweetness and honesty and humility, talking about his own vulnerability. I realised we now have a relationship with the Royal Family that is quite different from the one we used to have. Whereas we once looked at them, or tried to, as an ideal, as an emblem of perfection, it is now in their frailty and imperfection that they hold up a mirror to the nation.

Part of our Christmas national ritual is being aware that the Royal Family have all been at Sandringham together and walked over from the house to the church. We do not exactly watch this ritual, as we might watch the Monarch’s broadcast, but it is probably flickering away on the telly in the background while our own family Christmas is taking place. Only obsessives would watch it. Nevertheless, the newspapers usually have a picture next day, noting on the Princess Royal’s choice of coat, or whether Prince Louis is making funny faces at the poor old paparazzi who crouch there in the frost for the perfect ‘shot’ as they walk pass.

Nowadays we also notice the absences – no Harry, no Meghan, and now no Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, even though he will soon be living just over the field, perhaps himself ruefully watching his relations attending Morning Prayer, and wishing, yet again, that he had never met Jeffrey Epstein.

The King is anxious to keep the Sandringham traditions alive. So the walk to church is still performed. (He goes to church twice on Christmas Day, privately to an early Communion, and later on parade for Morning Prayer.) He clings to the inner circle of the family whom he trusts – Princess Margaret’s children, Lord Snowdon, Danny and Sarah Chatto, Princess Anne. After the broadcast, Eugenie and Beatrice will go at once – perhaps back to see their father having his final Christmas at Royal Lodge. Camilla goes back to the Parker-Bowleses in Gloucestershire. And Charles goes to his study to work – which is what he likes doing best. Being Royal.

What is a Royal Family for, exactly? David Dimbleby’s recent five-part BBC documentary asked the same thing of the Monarchy but the ‘Royal Family’ is a separate invention – of Prince Albert. He and Queen Victoria developed a mania for photography and Albert realised what a golden opportunity this new invention offered them. At a time when there was a strong republican movement in Britain (much larger than today) he would feed the public with images of himself, his wife and children, usually at Osborne House, their holiday villa on the Isle of Wight.

He would make them an Ideal Family. They would not be seen, like the upper classes, with guns under their arms, dressed for shooting. They would be posed as if they were middle class. They were a family that everyone could identify with. We could all make them our role model – and society, based on monogamous, loyal, heterosexual marriage, would thereby be strengthened.

Poor Prince Albert! His invention was well intentioned, but he was storing up troubles for his family, who had to spend the decades after his early death (aged 42) busily covering up the fact that, like all families, they were the very reverse of ideal. The Prince of Wales was a sex addict, well known in the Paris brothels and almost certainly gave his beautiful Danish wife Alexandra syphilis. Princess Louise, a clever, bored sculptress, was forced into marriage with a gay Scottish lord, and had a love affair with her sculptor friend Joseph Edgar Boehm. (She probably also slept with her brother-in-law, Henry of Battenberg). This year, it has been argued that their mother, Queen Victoria, probably had a baby with the Highland Ghillie, John Brown. 

The family feud between Princes Harry and William has also contributed to the soap opera

In other words, the Royal Family, far from being a Holy Icon to which grateful members of the Empire gazed adoringly, was a big mess. Like us. The difference between the past and now, in this area, is that there used to be a convention that the Press published only flattering stories about the family. The public were kept in the dark until a couple of days before the Abdication, in 1936, of King Edward VIII, who quit the job in order to marry an American divorcee.

The squabbles, the love affairs, the Royal Family’s defects of character were known only to themselves, and their intimates. The public were shown ‘ideal’ versions of the story – the Little Princesses playing with corgis, the wholesome grown-ups, reassuringly tweedy, seen only when opening hospitals or attending religious services.

But it is all changed now.

Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the best journalists of his era, was banned for years from appearing on the BBC for the crime of describing, in the early 1950s, the Royal Family as a ‘soap opera’. It was deemed by Lord Reith to be demeaning to mention the Royals and ‘soap opera’ in the same sentence. What would Reith have made of Meghan, who before her role in the current Royal Soap, was a starlet in one called Suits?

Muggeridge was right, though, and the Royal Family is a soap opera, in good senses, as well as in bad. Why are people addicted to EastEnders or Coronation Street? It is not because all the characters are people we want to be. No. It is because we half recognise ourselves and our own messy lives in the plot lines, as the characters fall out of love, have complicated liaisons, marital rows, face illness.

Ever since the 1950s, the Press began to change its attitudes to the Royal Family, the royal story has become more like a soap. It began when we – the Press – printed stories about Princess Margaret’s wish to marry a divorced man, Captain Peter Townsend.

By the time Prince Charles and his siblings had grown up, it was open season, and we, the Press, felt free to recognise that the Royals were human like the rest of us. And, boy oh boy – what a soap opera they all provided.

Having decided to sack Edward VIII for marrying a divorcee, the Royal Family and the Church, of which the Queen was Supreme Governor, watched marriage after marriage tear apart. Margaret and Tony Snowdon had long been a feast for the gossip columnists and they eventually split. Charles married his ‘fairy princess’ – and the rest is utterly tragic history.

The strange gang of people who have been dragooned into attending Morning Prayer at Sandringham this Christmas are, like us, flawed and frail and mortal, AN Wilson writes

Those journalists who criticised him for continuing to maintain relations with Mrs Parker Bowles, as she was then, while being married to Diana, were only reflecting what the great majority of people in Britain – and in the world – were feeling. Why? Because we all thought we were better than Charles and Camilla? Of course, not. But because, by continuing to keep their relationship alive, they were destroying the illusion of his fairy-tale romance with the beautiful young princess.

The other royal marriages fell like ninepins. Princess Anne, always the most sensible and no-nonsense of the royals, lived it down by telling the Press to ‘naff off’, and by pursuing an exemplary life of service to charities, notably the Save The Children Fund.

Andrew and Fergie were another story. The downfall of the former Yorks began with this paper’s 2011 publication of the infamous photo of the then-Duke with his armed snaked around the teenage waist of Virginia Roberts. The Mail on Sunday has unearthed a string of revelations since about the sordid affair and Andrew and Fergie’s poisonous association with Epstein – had it not, perhaps they would still be living at your expense in Royal Lodge, a 30-room mansion in Windsor Great Park.

It was also in these pages that Andrew Lownie’s biography of the pair was serialised in the summer. We learned from that book what the guilty pair and the rest of the family consider themselves entitled to have at our expense. Without which, no one would have questioned whether it was right for Charles to have bought Highgrove out of funds from the Duchy of Cornwall, and no one would have minded (because they are so boring) about Sophie and Edward living on a peppercorn rent, again at your expense, at Bagshot Park.

Meanwhile, very sadly, the Press has also broken the old convention that you were not supposed to mention that the Royal Family had bodily functions and illnesses. After all, George V’s life was said to be passing peacefully to its close when he had actually been finished off (a mercy killing by the royal doctor) several hours before. His son George VI’s advanced lung cancer was kept a complete secret more or less until his death.

Now, brave Kate Middleton comes before the camera to share the agony of what a young parent tells her children about this terrifying condition. King Charles, visibly frail, thanks cancer charities and makes a broadcast, admitting his own cancer.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, poor old Thomas Markle has his leg amputated, and the world waits in wonder to see whether the soap-opera star, Meghan, will stage a sob-stuff deathbed reconciliation. At the time of writing, we are on the edge of our seats to see.

As the catalogue of mishaps, tragedies and scandals in the previous paragraphs makes clear, there is something on the edge of ridiculous about the Royal Soap Opera. None of them would have chosen this to happen. Andrew and Fergie, guzzling and fornicating and spending other people’s money, would much prefer not have been unmasked. William and Kate would undoubtedly have much preferred it if Harry and Meghan had not been interviewed by Oprah Winfrey to claim that the royals (or one of them) were racist. They would have preferred it if Harry’s self-pitying memoir Spare had never been published, and that we did not know that the two brothers had, on at least one occasion, come to blows.

But it’s all out now, and nothing that we read about this profoundly dysfunctional family could possibly surprise us. This is the precise opposite of what Prince Albert intended when he invented the idea of a squeaky-clean Ideal Family all enjoying the calm harmony of Osborne. The paradox is that, though none of them would have wanted the kind of publicity they have received in recent years, the fact of their enacting a soap opera before our eyes has given a new depth to their function.

No one really believed, when they saw Cecil Beaton’s photographs of the dear old Queen Mother that she was the graceful, parasol-carrying, fairy-tale of the photographer’s imagining. We just wanted to believe in magic.

Now, our disbelief goes in an opposite direction. Having never quite believed that a Royal Family could be as good as the propaganda suggested, now we can’t quite believe that anyone could be as greedy as Fergie, as preposterously exhibitionistic as Meghan, as unaware of himself as Andrew.

Likewise, in the matter of ill health. It makes us admire the King and Catherine more, not less, that they continue to do their duties while suffering from cancer. And although we look forward with some misgivings to the future, we think sympathetically of Princes William and Harry for all they have been through. I do, anyway.

The strange gang of people who have been dragooned into attending Morning Prayer at Sandringham this Christmas are, some of them, much more hard-working, much braver and much nicer than some of us. But they are also, like us, flawed and frail and mortal.

Far from finding that disillusioning, I find it moving. The great classical dramas of the French theatre strictly divided tragedy and comedy. Moliere gave you the laughs, Racine took you to the serious heights. But our great dramatist, Shakespeare, reminded us that comedy and tragedy, disgrace and redemption, all exist side by side.