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Anyone can do anything, in fact, except throttle down a vast publicity engine that at times has seemed to be howling out of control. Britain has never seen alarums as sustained as these before. Since Diana appeared on the scene, the unwritten rules between the palace and the press have collapsed under the stampede for news. The palace press office has appealed to editors, but any truce that is called gets broken quickly. "Chasing royals is like a drug, an addiction," says Writer Ashley Walton of the Daily Express. The Queen's press secretary, Michael Shea, mutters about sanctions, but the Tower of London is open only to tourists, not prisoners. "A new wave of hysteria has gripped the more sensational press," he laments. "Anything to do with any aspect of the royal family, no matter how minute, is treated as a huge news story."
The royal family, meanwhile, can do little except schedule their usual tours and hope for less capricious coverage: this month the Queen and Philip in the New World; next month Charles, Diana and Baby William in Australia and New Zealand; Anne in Pakistan in May, where she will visit a refugee camp near the Afghan border. Last week it was disclosed that while Diana stayed behind and carried on with her regular schedule, Charles had just spent a week milking cows, delivering a calf and building stone fences on a tenant farm he owns in Cornwall. At the end he gave an exclusive interview to Donald Simpson, agriculture writer for the Western Morning News. The labor had been hard, he said, and his back hurt, but the farm breakfasts had been splendid and the rural values sound. He said he came to know the cows well "by their udders. I think being here has restored my sanity." Lest Fleet Street think its clamoring threatened to unhinge him, he added, "Being on the land does help one get a sense of proportion much better than being stuck in the city." Charles is an outdoorsman, and the farm stay was thoroughly in character, but it is also true that his week evoked the kind of symbolism that maintains the necessary royal illusion: that his family speaks for Britain, though not about government or anything else controversial; that they are mysterious and unapproachable, though much like me and thee; and that their position is awesome, though they can no longer singlehanded send armies into the field.
Charles' performance was good, sound, royal theater, of the kind not seen by the British in some months. Lately, in fact, the Queen has seemed to be presiding over a soap opera, a kind of intricate "Palace Dallas," as the joke now goes in London. Even the birth in June of a healthy baby boy, Prince William, to Charles and Diana did not prevent last year from taking on the quality of sloppily written royal melodrama.