William and Harry, thanks to their Dad, egged on by his Dad and Mum, have got a thorough indoctrination into the stuffed shirt and military traditions of the Windsors. They have been prepared to lead the troops on the battlefield as did Henry V on the fields of Agincourt. Harry by his own admission were even eager to go to Iraq. But last night they showed that, like their mother, they can play a crowd of 63,000 mostly young people at the nation’s premier football stadium. More like Laurence Olivier than Richard II.
The musical menu was mostly a mixture of rock n roll and modern day equivalents of the crooner of my youth. But it was the solitary classical item that brought a tear to Harry’s eye. When the football pitch was occupied by the entire cast of the English National Ballet, performing Swan Lake, which was apparently one of Diana’s favourites. Both of the Princes swayed and waved their arms along with the crowd, from their vantage point in the Royal Box and at one point William could be seen dancing with the lead singer of Take That, Lily Allen.
It could have been mawkish. But, in my eyes, it was not. And for the new Prime Minister, it was a reminder that though Britain has long ago been knocked out the premier league in electronics and the heavy industries, it is still a world leader in entertainment and the media. Although Take That does not yet have the international pull of the Beatles, which helped the economy and boosted national morale in Harold Wilson’s premiership, it is playing in the Premier League. And the televised version proved once again that the BBC can still grab the mass market. One enthusiastic commentator last night said the television audience was one billion. The delayed 10 o-clock news half an hour later put the audience at 500 million. Whatever it was very big.
The event has been planned over months by the Princes, their advisers and the BBC, and no-one could have predicted that it would actually happen in the first few days of Brown’s premiership. Nor that it would happen when the country was in the grip of a security threat at the highest critical letter. The audience gathered some of the would be bombers were still free and while the newsreels were showing the footage of the blazing car at Glasgow Airport.
The last act of the entertainment at Wembley was Elton John, who came on twenty minutes late, but brought the house down with two manic rousing numbers and one of his slow sentimental tear-jerkers. But the finale was a video tribute to Diana, recorded some time ago, by Nelson Mandela.
I hope Gordon Brown was watching. Because it was a timely reminder that locking up the terrorists, as South Africa locked up Mandela, is not enough to defeat terrorism. Mandela made his transition from terrorist or freedom fighter, to national leader and then to international statesman, with some help from the British. Particularly from Harold Macmillan, who in his winds of change speech, made it clear to the world that Britain that the days of Empire were over and that South Africa could no longer rely on Britain’s support for denying the majority in that country their claim to political power.
The make-up of Gordon Brown’s cabinet makes it clear that he hopes to follow a more independent line from George Bush’s America than Tony Blair. Let’s hope that he is not deflected by the renewed terrorist threat to be pushed off that course. Tough on terrorism, yes. But, just as important, addressing the causes of terrorism.