Common Touch? Don’t Ask Royals

‘We had thought it a most truly ripping idea,” said Queen Elizabeth II, using the royal “we,” after another attempt to paint the besieged royal family as “just folks” spectacularly backfired before a national TV audience. The new BBC live morning show “Breakfast at Buckingham Palace” was no more than five minutes old before Prince Philip squashed a grapefruit in her majesty’s face as she scolded him for arriving home at 4 a.m. with lipstick on his sash. The queen responded with a conk from a rolling pin before both began screaming, “Get that horse out of here,” until a footman said it was Princess Anne.

“Mere family ‘horseplay,’ ” the Duke of Edinburgh insisted later. Ordinary Britons aren’t so sure, as they are unsure that their monarch and her fractious kin can ever regain public affection. “They always just miss,” laments an insider. Example: Told to do more good works, Prince Charles had his ears shortened by plastic surgery and founded The Institute for Inbred Windsors to help similarly deformed relatives. Public donations languish at sixpence. The 98-year-old Queen Mother invited 100 commoners to a palace knitting bee last week--and promptly set back the royals’ campaign for a more contemporary image by 70-odd years when she vowed to “keep knitting scarves for the troops until we’ve vanquished Kaiser Bill.”

Meanwhile, it is rumored in palace circles that the queen herself may lack real insight into the current royal dilemma or her role in its cure. “It isn’t only that she keeps calling for Mr. Churchill,” explains a court member, “she ordered a Christmas bag of oranges for every poorhouse in her realm.” This monarch may be slightly out of step with her times.”

Prince Philip, for his part, seems equally ill-equipped to win back his subjects’ affections by showing himself to be a caring, sharing consort. His post-command-performance champagne supper in a private suite at the Savoy with two of the Spice Girls last month was widely regarded as being in questionable taste. Locking up his chauffeur in the Tower of London for driving too slowly has not gone down well with Britain’s motorists and pedestrians alike. And Prince Charles? “Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!” blared one London tabloid headline, after the heir to the throne tried humanizing his image by releasing a line of greeting cards featuring naughty verses from his private correspondence with Camilla Parker-Bowles.

“Thank God for Prince Andrew and Prince Edward,” sighs a royal equerry. The queen’s second and third sons, now touring the Midlands with their band, Royal Jell-O, have not only grasped the need for empathy with the common folk, but achieved it. Their spectacular act, backed by the Grenadier Guards Hip-Hop Dancers and featuring a walk-on by Princess Margaret singing the Alanis Morissette hit, “Jagged Little Pill,” is a sellout. Speaking of Princess Margaret, her pilot TV show to replace “Breakfast at Buckingham Palace,” “Cocktails for Breakfast,” looks like a go.