‘Harry Hewitt’ vs the BBC

A couple of years ago, a stand-up comedian cracked a joke about the royal family celebrating the Queen’s birthday. “It was a small affair,” he said. “Just the close family – and Harry.”

The joke was rewarded with uproarious laughter because the audience was familiar with the persistent rumour that Prince Harry was sired by his mother’s lover, Capt. James Hewitt.

Now, according to The Times, “this outrageous and discredited insinuation” will resurface in King Charles III, a BBC drama to be shown on Wednesday.

Apparently Harry’s love interest asks him: “Is Charles really your dad? Or was it the other one?” Now considering the pervasive nature of the rumour that just won’t die, the question is plausible if tactless and probably groundless.

Yet the very fact that it’ll be asked has caused an uproar from all sorts of predictable quarters fronted by Rosa Monckton. I don’t know what Miss Monckton’s CV actually says, but I know what it should say: Professional Friend and Closest Confidante of Diana.

I’m sure she must possess other qualifications as well, but much of her popular appeal comes from acting as a self-appointed guardian of Diana’s reputation and legacy, such as they are.

Donning that hat yet again, Miss Monckton said: “The BBC is deliberately causing pain to a real living person in a salacious fashion. The fact is this is not a harmless myth – these people are still alive.”

On her own touchy-feely terms she’s doubtless right. Prince Harry won’t enjoy watching that “insinuation” come back to life, “outrageous and discredited” as it may be. After all, this young man is endowed with extrovert hypersensitivity, as he doesn’t mind showing to all and sundry in the very same media.

Now I for one am ready to accept the evidence that Prince Harry was born before his mother two-timed his father, the eponymous King Charles III to be – especially since Hewitt himself says the same thing. Harry does look like Hewitt, but that’s no proof of paternity. Neither is Harry’s ginger hair, as anyone who has seen Diana’s red-headed brother Lord Spencer can confirm.

Still, it’s possible that Hewitt et al. are lying to protect her sacred memory and especially the reputation of the royal family – I doubt we’ll ever know or care to know the indisputable truth.

Yet the criticism levelled at the BBC is fully justified on both specific and general grounds. For the BBC makes it its daily business to violate the Charter it must obey to qualify for public money. The first three items specified therein demand “sustaining citizenship and civil society, promoting education and learning, stimulating creativity and cultural excellence.”

If the BBC ever does any of these things, it’s only by accident. Most of the time it runs tawdry entertainment (which I’m sure King Charles III will be) or else vents its left-wing bias through pseudo-serious programmes pitched at an intellectual level between mental vacuity and retardation.

Having said all that, Miss Monckton, or for that matter Prince Harry, shouldn’t get too worked up about this. For Diana only has herself to blame, posthumously as it may be. She herself besmirched her reputation by embarking on multiple affairs, of which the one with Hewitt was the most publicised but neither the first nor the last.

This was accompanied by expert manipulation of the media, culminating in that notorious BBC interview in which Diana flapped her eyelashes histrionically and admitted with girlish gasps that she “adored him”.

Now, even if the mauvaises langues cast aspersion on Harry’s paternal descent, his maternal lineage is in no doubt: he has inherited his mother’s vulgar tendency to wear her sensitive heart on her sleeve, unaware that this sartorial habit may cake that organ in grime.

He and his brother would do better choosing their paternal grandparents for role models. They’d then learn how to discharge their duties with reticent and selfless dignity, serving the public rather than acting out their own – and their mother’s – notions of emotional incontinence.

Both Diana and her paramour got off lightly, for both committed not just a marital indiscretion but a state crime. Specifically, they violated the Treason Act of 1351 that’s still in force today.

According to the Act, adultery with the wife of the king or heir to the throne is high treason punishable by death. At the time Diana played the beast with two backs with Hewitt, high treason was the only crime calling for the capital punishment, although that has since been replaced by life imprisonment.

The Act is ambivalent on whether or not the wife herself is equally guilty, but any clever barrister would doubtless cite precedents, such as Anne Boleyn, who lost her pretty head by supposedly having been unfaithful to Henry VIII.

Such touchiness in this matter is natural, for the wife’s hanky-panky outside the royal bed may raise doubts about succession, which can be deadly to the whole dynasty. This, to me, is a more interesting angle from which to examine Diana’s amorous record.

It’s also a good reason for Miss Monckton and other Diana hagiographers to moderate their indignation at the BBC’s lèse–majesté. People may accuse them of sharing their heroine’s talent for disingenuous manipulation.