Camilla’s Sexy Basso–Tina Fawns On

Jack Schafer writes in Slate about the Royal Suck up this week in the Washington Post.

“The one Post contributor undeserving of forgiveness is professional Brit Tina Brown, who writes a weekly column for Style. Brown approaches her “royal” subjects with supine kindness, making her piece look like beat sweetener for her forthcoming Diana book. Brown puts points on the scoreboard for the “royals” by noting that Camilla has “very good legs,” is “smaller, prettier, more delicate” than you might think, and isn’t the “horseface” she appears to be in press shots.

These testimonials don’t convince me that had she found Camilla a total barker she would have written so. At times, Brown’s subservience causes her to write in a kind of code I found impossible to crack. “[Camilla’s] easy responses come in a sexy basso that makes you want to pull up a chair and sit down,” Brown writes. Do you suppose that “pull up a chair and sit down”—like “shag”—is Brit-speak for having sexual intercourse?’

After flattering Camilla, Brown keeps her eye on the book project by sympathizing with poor, poor pedantic Charles, a man she describes as born out of time and “essentially raised by his grandmother,” who “did his midlife crisis backward.” “Now everyone can see how wonderful she is,” the prince told me quietly as his wife plunged through the sea of sharp elbows of the museum’s drafty atrium.”

The Windsors are versatile in the art of autodestruction, and their adventures would make a good novel, and maybe even a good column, if we weren’t so familiar with their creepy stories. But Charles takes the prize when it comes to sustained, lifelong loserdom. He’s had neither the courage to abandon his ceremonial obligations nor to embrace them, and his bottomless self-pity has made him an international laughingstock.”