Guardian columnist David McKie dissects the dispute over GM crops dividing the Windsors
Tuesday June 6, 2000
The descendants of Richard Wagner, it emerges today, are engaged in a complex family feud as to who should manage the composer's artistic legacy. Top of the pile at present is Wolfgang, Richard's grandson, who, although 80, won't step down from his job as festival director at Bayreuth unless the job goes to his present wife; as opposed to two other determined candidates, his first wife's daughter Eva, and a rebellious niece. Let nobody think that the British can't stage dynastic feuds of this vividness. It may not be quite as lurid, as suffused by the spirit of Götterdämmerung, but we have our own home-grown equivalent here in the form of the sudden dynastic dispute ravaging the House of Windsor.
Prince Charles, as everyone knows, is keen on organic farming and aghast at genetically modified foods. But this weekend, his sister the Princess Royal came out the other way round. In an interview with the Grocer, a publication to which royals don't usually talk, she gently but firmly disparaged organic farming and spoke in guarded favour of GM foods.
The Queen, in public at least, is neutral in these matters. But now the Duke of Edinburgh has dipped a characteristically insensitive toe into the great debate. He thinks (I paraphrase here, but only slightly) that the great GM agitation is a lot of boloney. Were these techniques, he demanded, so very different from breeding fast racehorses together to produce even faster racehorses? (The House of Windsor is famously fond of bloodstock metaphor.) Far greater threats, he told a meeting at Windsor Castle, had been introduced into the ecology over the years: grey squirrels, for instance.
Like other previous outbursts from this source, this one may not have been designed to reach the ears of the public. The duke was replying to a GM-sceptical lecture from the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. But now that Charles is outnumbered two to one, it seems only right for other family members to enter the lists.
We have yet to hear the view of Prince Andrew, who perhaps believe that GM foods are what gets served in the Vauxhall canteen. Where does Fergie stand on these matters? Or Prince Edward? And will the Queen Mother speak out - perhaps at the celebrations, now only two months away, of her 100th birthday? Beyond them stand dukes and duchesses in serried ranks, their views still unplumbed by the media. Now the duke is involved, this story could run and run.
Mark Jones http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList