As the bunting comes down after the Diamond Jubilee, the Queen is not the only member of the Royal Family to have emerged from the celebrations with her reputation enhanced.
In the space of five minutes, and with the help of a few scribbled words in red ink, the Prince of Wales has turned out to be one of the success stories of the holiday weekend.
By the standards of royal rhetoric, the Prince’s address at the end of the concert outside Buckingham Palace on Monday night scarcely qualified as a speech. Just over five minutes long, it was more what Palace officials describe as “remarks”.
But with a few good jokes, some poignant observations about his father and a touching tribute to the Queen, the Prince came across as a more human, caring and aware individual than he has seemed for a long time.
From his opening gambit of “Your Majesty ... Mummy” — a throwback to his speech at the golden wedding concert ten years earlier — to the three cheers for the Queen, Charles’s words were all his own.
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For his regular speeches, Charles has a team of advisers to help him that includes William Nye, his principal private secretary, and Paddy Harverson, his communications secretary. For such personal remarks, however, Charles is left to write them by himself, although his staff might give him a few pointers such as reminding him to thank the 600 technicians who worked on the concert.
He would then have a secretary type up bullet points for him to refer to during his speech. Some of the most personal parts — including his exhortation for the audience to shout loudly enough for Prince Philip to hear them in hospital — would have been added later in red pen, possibly during the concert itself.
While it was that emotional appeal which struck a chord with so many, the rest of the speech revealed much about Prince Charles himself. Apart from a debatable line about medals — Charles reminded the Queen he had been through three of her jubilees and had the medals to prove it — the jokes were well-delivered.
More importantly, his remarks about the Queen’s qualities said as much about the Prince as they did about his mother. When he spoke of how people were suffering hardship and difficulty, it was both a recognition of the privation experienced by many during the recession, and a deliberate attempt to be inclusive, to reach out to those who might feel that the Jubilee celebrations were an unnecessary extravagance.
The significance of the speech extended beyond the concert. Last week the BBC broadcast a filmed tribute to the Queen by Prince Charles that showed Royal Family home movie footage and photograph albums that had never been seen before. The film portrayed a touching, even sentimental side of the royals that showed both the Queen and Prince Charles in a new, more human light. It also did something to dispel the idea, encouraged by Prince Charles as much as anyone else, that he had a cold, emotionally barren upbringing.
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If Charles’s speech was one of the significant moments of the Jubilee weekend, so too was the balcony appearance at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday afternoon. The slimmed down team that went out to wave to the crowds, just six of them including the Queen, was an obvious attempt to concentrate on the core members of the Royal Family. As such, it chimes in exactly with Charles’s view that the Royal Family should be pared down to a much smaller team than it is at present.
Buckingham Palace would, no doubt, like people to believe that all such decisions were taken by the Queen. The Prince of Wales, however, is not to be ignored. And increasingly he won’t be.