Royal rumpus.

Mr. Lejeune is NR's longtime London correspondent.

LONDON

WOULD the Queen be watching Panorama tonight, Buckingham Palace was asked before Princess Diana's sensational interview. "Her Majesty does not watch Panorama," came the lofty reply, "and she is anyway attending the Royal Variety Show this evening." To which the obvious answer was that she should get one of the younger members of her family to show her how to work a videotape recorder.

In a televised discussion immediately after the interview, Nicholes Soames, a rather buffoonish government minister who happens to be Winston Churchill's grandson and a friend of Prince Charles, said it had been "toe-curlingly dreadful" and that the Princess was in "the advanced stages of paranoia." He was afterward rebuked, off- stage, by the prime minister: but that first response, like the pomposity of the Buckingham Palace spokesman, served only to illustrate, in ordinary people's eyes, what the Princess is up against -- the nature, as she would put it, of "the enemy."

The Palace establishment, the courtiers, have consistently underrated her. When the War of the Waleses first became public, they let their opinion be known that she would "fade away." Some fade: she is far quicker on her feet than they are. To do them justice, the transformation from a naive girl, whose only distinction at school was for "best-kept hamster," into a vengeful Valkyrie armed with incomparable photogeneity took everyone by surprise, including her. We can all see now that she is far from being "thick as two planks."

She gave one of the most remarkable television performances ever shown; calculated, touching, adroit. The producers were very wise to keep what they were doing hidden from the chairman of the BBC and then to suggest, by prudent disinformation, that the interview was innocuous. Efforts might well have been made to prevent or censor the broadcast, and the BBC is notoriously vulnerable to such pressure. The plan to market, very lucratively, a video of the interview has been, at least temporarily, withdrawn, either because the BBC, losing its nerve, wanted to appease the Palace, or because the Princess, hoping to arrange a new concordat with the Palace, refused permission.

Some people claim to be bored by the whole Charles and Diana story. But then some people didn't like Dallas. The British people generally spoke of little else for a week. The tabloid Daily Mirror, on the morning after the broadcast, devoted every one of its 16 news pages to Diana. Sympathy, indignation, emotional and partisan reactions swirled around. The split between the pro-Diana and pro-Charles factions was absolute -- but not equal. Polls showed public support for Diana running as high as 85 per cent. No wonder the Palace was alarmed. The Daily Telegraph, which has taken the most priggish stand against royal revelations, chose, rather than condemning Diana absolutely, to blame the BBC.

The polemical journalist and historian Paul Johnson compared the degree of popular commitment and division to such previous great disputes as those over the Boer War, Irish Home Rule, the abdication of Edward VIII, and the attack on Suez. He saw Diana as the offspring of her Whig ancestors, using the power of the people against the Throne. Recalling the eerily similar case of the Prince Regent and the estranged Queen Caroline, he quoted a remark that had been made in after years by their daughter: "My mother was bad but she would not have become as bad as she was if my father had not been infinitely worse."

Nobody -- well, hardly anybody -- says that the warring Waleses are bad. Roughly, young people side with Diana, feeling that she speaks their language, even (or particularly) when it verges on psycho-babble; whereas older people, especially upper-class older people, whose tradition has been to support the royal family in all circumstances, are sorry for, and wish to shelter, Charles. Women are more inclined than men to "see through" Diana. Every aspect of the interview -- clothes, lighting, psychiatric indications, body language -- has been scrutinized and analyzed.

DESPITE Diana's apparent frankness, mysteries and inconsistencies remain. Was her telephone bugged? Who leaked her calls? What did she mean by saying that, although she didn't want a divorce, she never expected to become Queen?

A divorce would present no constitutional problem, and the Church of England -- which, of late, has proved infinitely flexible -- would no doubt swallow it. But the British people would not accept a Queen Camilla. Like Shakespeare's "base Indian," the royal establishment, in failing to cherish Diana, have thrown away a pearl richer than all their tribe.

However, despite alarmist frowns not only from the establishment but from much of the press, there seems no reason why the institution of monarchy should have been damaged. Royalty now is more interesting -- closer, in a sense, to the people -- than it has been for a very long while. The twentieth-century concept of royalty as glistening puppets, with impeccable private lives, their true personalities concealed, their utterances guarded to the point of vacuity, acting only on the "advice" of politicians, bears little relation to the idea of monarchy in which monarchists believe.

Diana, seeking now, in the wake of her visit to Argentina, some defined role as an "Ambassador for Britain," may well not understand -- or greatly care about -- the constitutional difficulty of what she is asking. Here indeed lies the nub of the problem, both for courtiers and for politicians shackled by a conventional attitude to such matters. Diana, with her curious blend of simplicity and deviousness, threatens to expose and, in so doing, to crack the whole fragile charade of twentieth-century monarchy.

To those who value the monarchy -- and most people in Britain still do -- this is a very dangerous way to behave. Some see it, therefore, as a republican conspiracy, in which the vindictive, publicity-seeking Diana is being used. But this is really nonsense. If her conduct and her (to the courtiers) unwelcome, inexplicable power force loyal subjects to think a bit more about the nature and appropriate behavior of royalty, it may be no bad thing.

Since Charles and Diana have presumably been made unhappy by the failure of their marriage and the tit-for-tat revelations, and since their children (of whose reaction, so far, we know nothing) must find the whole thing traumatic, this is a sad story. But it is also an enthralling one; not merely as a soap opera but as a human drama and as part of the pageant of history. What people in their right minds would want to swap it for a dreary succession of ceremonial presidents?