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May those with perfect lives write the first jabs

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published April 10, 2005

Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles finally wed on Saturday. I, for one, wish them a long and happy marriage with nary a botox injection or tabloid hatchet job in their future.

Granted, Camilla doesn't look like model Kate Moss, that once-anorectic darling of the British media and fashion worlds. And it's a safe bet Charles will never attain the stature of a Churchill or Disraeli.

But at least Charles made an honest woman of his longtime paramour, following in a royal tradition. His great uncle, Edward VIII, gave up the throne in 1936 rather than go without "the woman I love," Wallis Simpson.

(Unlike Camilla, Simpson was on everybody's best-dressed list, but the British hated her too. She was, you know, American.)

I've always found it fascinating that a society so stiffly proper on the surface can roil with so much passion underneath. Every time you pick up a British paper, another politician or royal is cavorting around.

Who can forget Sarah Ferguson's toe-sucking encounter with a Texas millionaire while Prince Andrew was who-knows-where? Or Princess Diana's numerous flings when her marriage to Charles hit the rocks?

John Major's seven years as prime minister were marked by a series of sex scandals that helped topple his Conservative government. After he left office in 1997, it was revealed that Major - who championed "Back to Basics" family values - himself had a four-year affair with a colleague while both were married.

The Conservatives were ousted by the Labor Party, which campaigned on the slogan "no more sleaze," only to find Foreign Secretary Robin Cook running around with his much younger aide. Told that a newspaper was about to break the story, Prime Minister Tony Blair purportedly gave Cook an ultimatum: Your wife or your secretary.

Cook chose the secretary. He later resigned, not because of the adultery but because he opposed the war in Iraq.

Last year, the British press went gaga over revelations that David Blunkett, the divorced home secretary, had been having an affair with Kimberly Quinn, the married publisher of the Spectator magazine. Quinn reportedly seduced Blunkett, who is blind, by telling him she was tall and blond. She is short and brunet.

Extramarital affairs were common among the monarchy and upper classes even in the prim Victorian era, but were largely kept behind closed doors until the 1960s. Then the media discovered that sex sells and the public began questioning norms of conduct.

"It's not as if anything new is occurring, but now it's in the public gaze," says Dr. Lawrence Goldman, an expert on British culture and editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

"The reason we're fascinated is not just prurience but because of our uncertainties and doubts across a whole range of moral values."

The French, he noted, have always had a more liberal attitude toward sex and "can't understand why we get so worked up about these things." And in the United States, the influence of Christian conservatives has shaped strong views on abortion, gay sex and other issues that British politicians tend to regard as private matters.

"We don't have that kind of moralistic politics and we've never really had it," Goldman says. "We're uncertain about moral questions because our politicians are not really giving us a lead."

While no one expects the British to lose their engrossment with sex, it would be nice if the media at least curbed their attacks on Camilla's looks and fashion sense. After all, we journalists don't have much room to talk.

An exception: After Diana's death in 1997, I found myself in Great Brington, her childhood village, with three impeccably dressed men. I asked where they were from, to which they replied in the most upper crust of accents:

""The Sun." ""The Mirror." ""The Express." - three decidely low-brow tabloids.

In honor of the royal nuptials, I think the tabs and the rest of us journalists should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. No catty suggestions that 57 is too old for jeans, no hyperventilating over improbable affairs d'coeur.

At least not until something else juicy comes along.

Susan Taylor Martin can be reached at susan@sptimes.com

[Last modified April 10, 2005, 00:41:07]