Finally, the Royal Family has been dragged kicking and screaming to make a kind of pre-emptive strike. Sort of. The disclosure that the person who had obtained an injunction -- to prevent publication of a story about a senior Royal whose identity we were not allowed to know doing something we were not allowed to know with someone else whose name we weren't allowed to know -- was the Prince of Wales's former valet Michael Fawcett, meant the trail led to only one person.

So now Prince Charles has outed himself with the remarkable statement by his senior aide, Sir Michael Peat, that whatever he was supposed to have done he hadn't done it. But we still don't know what it was.

When will the Royal firm wake up to the 21st century? When will they get a strategic brain? It was obvious a long time ago thaat this secret would eventually come out. Too many people knew about it; and the website rumour mill was always going to circulate it. indeed, it is the secrecy of the thing that has fuelled the frenzy: the fact that this is supposed to be the allegation on the 'Crown Jewels' tape, whose disappearance from Diana's possessions sparked the police action against Paul Burrell.

If the Royals had come clean about this from the start, there would have been a brief uproar but they would have been in control of the situation by claiming -- as they are now doing too late -- that this was a preposterous suggestion by a sick man and was utterly untrue. But they didn't. They left it so that they allowed themselves to become the sustained target of blackmail, and to look as if they had something to hide so that it is having to be dragged out of them.

And they still haven't said what this allegation actually is.

Posted by melanie at November 7, 2003