Light, as one of Walter Bagehot?s memorable injunctions warned, destroys the magic of royalty. Charles, the prince of Wales, has allowed in too much light for royalty to maintain its dignity in the modern world. This is not a comment on Prince Charles?s well-known liaison with Ms Camilla Parker-Bowles but on the prince?s somewhat gratuitous outburst against the education system in Great Britain. Prince Charles?s grouse seems to be the fact that the modern education system in Britain opens careers out to talent and to merit. He spoke in favour of the privileges of birth and suggested that people from certain social classes are unfit for certain occupations. Ability, the heir apparent to Elizabeth Regina believes, is dependent on birth. To say, as the British education secretary, Mr Charles Clarke, has done, that these views are ?old-fashioned? is to take a very mild view of the prince?s pronouncements. For one thing, it should be remembered that the views of the prince of Wales are entirely in keeping with his own social and cultural standing. British royalty, especially the present dynasty, has never been well-known for either its taste or its good manners. For another, it is apposite that Prince Charles should advocate a society based on the privileges of birth. After all, he is what he is today ? giving his opinion on matters all and sundry ? not because of his own achievements but because of who he is by birth and lineage. That lineage, members of the Windsor dynasty need to be reminded, originates in a minor German dynasty which inherited the British monarchy and the British Empire through the happenstance of marriage.

The more important point is the damage Prince Charles has done to the position of British monarchy. The latter, as an institution, has a very tenuous and a paradoxical existence. The paradox is rooted in the uneasy co-existence of monarchy with democracy. The queen is a glorified rubber stamp whose existence is paid for by the Civil List. The inhabitants of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle represent a feudal hangover in a modern and capitalist world. The attempt to preserve the feudal ambience is best carried out in a closet. Feudalism and its airs are best seen in public as ritual, as manifestation of pomp and circumstance that are associated with monarchy and with the grandeur of the modern state. Most of these rituals, in fact, have no medieval lineage but are all 19th century inventions of tradition. By bringing the values and prejudices of that feudal hangover into public discussion, Prince Charles has only underlined the paradox that the British royalty embodies. In so doing, he has only made himself and the institution he represents look ridiculous and risible.

Nobody denies the existence of social classes in Britain. But the yardstick and the marks of social distinction have changed completely over the last fifty years. There has been a clear move from the elitism of birth to the elitism of merit. Society has moved from being aristocratic to being professional. The change is captured aptly in the career of Ms Margaret Thatcher, an ordinary girl who went to Oxford and to prime ministership and was then made a Baroness by the queen. Merit has opened the floodgates of social mobility in Britain. The prince of Wales is so stuck-up with privilege and prejudice that he has missed this crucial transformation in British society.