Maybe there will always be an England after all.
I was having my doubts.
A recent story from Scripps Howard News Service, for example, carried the astounding news that a British restaurateur has become the first Englishman since World War II to win a Michelin star for his establishment.
I was stunned. Handing out Michelin stars to Brits for the excellence of their cuisine is akin to awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Danielle Steele. Bad food, especially those dreadful alleged “puddings,” is a British tradition as old as flogging.
Happily, reading on, I discovered that the chap is married to a French woman, studied cooking in France, worked there for 18 years, and serves French cuisine in his French restaurant, which is in Cannes, not Coventry.
“I’m a pure product of France,” he said.
Whew.
Even deeper doubts were instilled by the recent egalitarian antics of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Apparently inspired by the rise of his friend Bill Clinton from Arkansas trailer trash to America’s highest office, Blair launched this daft campaign to reduce Britain to a classless modern democracy in which the scum of the earth would be considered no less personages than the most titled nobility.
Blair has even gone so far as to throw the titled nobility out of the House of Lords, replacing the poor, doddering hereditary peers with politically appointed ones–a move comparable to populating Chicago’s exclusive Casino Club with precinct captains all dressed up in black tie.
But, with this new Mohamed Al Fayed fracas over the deaths of Princess Di and his playboy son Dodi, my fears have now been completely laid to rest. The sceptered isle endures–as it’s always been.
Aside from all those halberds, bodkins and tea tins, what distinguishes Britain most from all other nations, don’t you know, is the resolute intractability of its class system.
Though it has long tried to ape the British, the American class system has always been based entirely on mere money, and consequently is about as rigid as Silly Putty.
There was a nasty strain of bigotry running through American social classes for a while, but even that has been trampled. As the late, great Digby Balzell warned would happen, the WASP ascendancy (and bigotry) that once ruled the stock market, banking, the law and even Madison Avenue has been thoroughly pushed aside by more aggressive non-WASPs who understood that the business of America is making money, not snobbery.
But the class system in Britain lives on and on because it is a true hierarchy, built on a foundation of centuries-old tradition and an entrenched titled aristocracy.
And held together with the Super Glue that is the Royal Family.
True, this glue is not as firm as it was in the days before Camilla Parker Bowles and Duchess Fergie. But, if anyone doubts its power, just dangle a Royal Invitation before a Ted Turner, Jane Fonda or Jesse Jackson and watch ’em come running (as I was able to witness at the queen’s British Embassy garden party here in 1991).
I have never met Princess Di’s putative father-in-law Mr. Fayed, and cannot say whether the multi-millionaire department store and hotel mogul in any way deserves the appellation “social climber.”
The drunk-driving accident that killed both must have been devastating to Fayed–and to his chances for prominence in British society.
So distraught has Fayed become that he has publicly accused the British government of conspiring to kill Dodi and Di, and thus prevent a socially embarrassing marriage.
In his just-published, much-media-hyped book, “The Bodyguard’s Story,” Di’s stalwart if unsuccessful bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, soundly refutes Fayed’s claim. The only surviving passenger of the death car, Rees-Jones puts the blame entirely on the driver, an alcohol and drug-laden Fayed employee.
I do not know if Rees-Jones is going to be made a viscount for his troubles, but his effort here really isn’t necessary.
The queen has dealt with Fayed in resolute and time-tested British fashion.
Since the Middle Ages, purveyors of goods and services who do business with the crown are favored with highly prized royal warrants, which gain them much honor, allow them to put royal insignia on their labels and signs, guarantee them business and otherwise identify them as very special.
There have been royal fishmongers, royal rat catchers and even royal toilet cleaners. Rees-Jones may yet become royal talk-show defender of the realm.
Fayed owns Harrods Department Store, a classic and great London establishment that has long been a royal purveyor of goods to the palace.
No longer. The queen has just now struck Harrod’s from the royal warrant list. She and the British class system have spoken–as usual, without having to say a word.
