When someone tells you that they are “at a loss to understand” quite how something regrettable has happened, one knows that they probably aren’t; more likely, they understand only too well, or at least imagine they do.
When Tessa Jowell received Prince Charles’s letter about the less than ideal funding prospects for the conservation of Scott and Shackleton’s Antarctic huts, she probably knew that her correspondent wasn’t quite buying the line that, what with this all happening a long way away, it wasn’t really up to us to put our hands in our pockets.
“But, on the other hand” – that other hand being a staple of the determined letter-writer – “I thought there was something called ‘the Government of the British Antarctic Territory’ which must mean there is some British Territory to be ‘governed’!”. Indeed. How could one not be at a loss?
Prince Charles’s letters to the then prime minister and assorted secretaries of state are studded with this sort of self-deprecation – the extent to which it is of the “faux” variety is a matter of opinion, although one notes it is rarely accompanied by a withdrawal from the topic at hand.
More usually, the gesture towards any lack of credentials is followed by a ferociously detailed mapping out of the terrain and an equally clear-eyed plan for how the future might be approached. Not to mention the head-scratching, can-it-really-be-thus? exclamation marks that appear frequently.
Throughout, our correspondent establishes his overriding desire simply to be useful, even when he fears he might not be; to Charles Clarke, secretary of state for education – “If you can bear to receive a report on this year’s Education Summer School from someone with such old-fashioned views (!) … ”; to Elliot Morley, minister of state for the environment – “I am probably being very ignorant about this … ”).
His language (small details: grammar fine, prefers z spellings to s, favours the archaic amongst over the plainer “among”) is insistently reasonable, sensible, hopeful. He wonders whether things might be possible, feels it would be splendid if, thinks it might be helpful to – this to Tony Blair, on the plight of beef and sheep farmers – make a list of the main points of discussion. It is not an especially short list.
He is inclined to sneak in a follow-up point; the poor performance of Lynx aircraft comes at the end of that letter to Blair (whose style – “hearts and minds”, “holistically” – is also telling), and alternative medicine concludes a letter to which is added a handwritten apology for its length. One feels he might, actually, have had enough material to go on for rather longer.
