According to the Court Circular this week, at the very time that King Charles was receiving the President of Ghana at Buckingham Palace, the Prince of Wales was paying a visit to the Prince of Peckham. It turned out he was not meeting a fellow Royal from an obscure south London lineage, but was going to a public house where they sell a cocktail called Randy Bull and offer a Jerk Chicken Bun for £15.95.
It was all in a day’s work for Prince William, who was pictured behind the bar of the award-winning community pub (motto: “White Men Can’t Jerk”) pulling pints of Red Stripe. But this photo opportunity represented much more than a further, carefully crafted burnishing of William’s credentials as an everyday geezer, coming a matter of days after his fist-pumping display of support for Aston Villa. For all his light-hearted presence, it was a significant foray into the politics of Britain, in its widest sense.
When he said “I love pubs”, it was not in itself a controversial statement. The British pub – rather like the Royal Family, in fact – is a cherished and popular part of our culture and heritage, but which is struggling to stay relevant in the modern world. It was his follow-up comment – “I want to do as much as I can to support them… we need to protect our pubs” – that was loaded with meaning, and could be seen as a direct criticism of the policies of the current Labour Government.
