A right royal ragging .sx Are the tabloids swinging towards republicanism ?sx Not while the royals act as big stick with which to beat the left , says John Diamond .sx A theory currently going the rounds of the diasporate Fleet Street is that the Murdoch tabloids have got it in for the royals .sx That the glorious republic , when it comes , will be heralded by a rollicking Ron Spark leader ( " The Sun Says Give Us Liberty , Folks , or Give Us Death !sx " ) is , apparently , finally proved by the Sun's publication , last week , of a photograph showing the Duke of York as only his mother , his wife and a few dozen hopeful debs had previously seen him .sx It was hardly hot news .sx The photo was seven years old and those parts of the Duke's genitalia that weren't covered by the spray from the Canadian river in which he was " .sx .. skinny dipping after a hike with old school pals " were obscured with a large crown sketched in by the Sun's art department ; even thus coyly displayed , the picture proved , blustered Neil Thorne MP , that the Sun is determined " to undermine the Royal Family " .sx Well perhaps it is and perhaps it isn't .sx " Think about it , " says one Sun staffer .sx " Rupert Murdoch is an Australian by birth .sx Australians tend to resent the royals family .sx And Murdoch was a mate of Gough Whitlam whose government was brought down by the Governor General , which as far as most Australians are concerned , means the Queen .sx How could he be anything other than a republican ?sx " This is just the sort of convoluted conspiracy theory that you'd normally see only in the tabloids' own opinion columns , but it's a view I've heard from a number of senior journalists recently .sx Unfortunately , it ignores the fact that , although Murdoch had once been a friend of , and had supported , Whitlam , by the time of Whitlam's fall , the Murdoch papers in Australia were at the head of the press pack baying for his blood .sx It ignores , too , the more salient point that Murdoch's political line has only ever been consistent in terms of its pragmatism and never in terms of ideology .sx Indeed , I was told by one Murdoch manager the other week that there is a move to turn Today into a Labour paper :sx " There's a chance that Labour will get in at the next election , and it would be useful to have a sympathetic paper around as a defence against all those Labour MPs who will be out to get us for winning the last three elections for the Tories .sx " .sx But the 'Andrew Romps Naked in Lake' story is only the latest in a series that , the monarchists suggest , is hard evidence of a tabloid swing towards , at best , a prurient l e-grave se-majest e and , at worst , outright republicanism .sx Simon Hughes' bill to tax the royal income got him a useful 'Pay Up , Ma'am' editorial in the Sun and a full page of fence - striding punditry in Today .sx Nigel Dempster signed a front-page splash in the Mail announcing the imminent split up of the Prince and Princess of Wales as 'A Cause for Concern' and on Sunday the News of the World showed a grubby picture of a minor-league royal at a rubber fetishists' party as evidence of the Windsor family's irredeemable decadence .sx I wish I could tell you that all of this means our present Queen will be the last .sx It doesn't .sx At the most basic level , the tabloids don't want to lose the royals for the same reason that they don't want to lose Arthur Scargill , the Bishop of Durham , Myra Hindley or Romping Roger The Randy Reverend .sx These figureheads are not just a source of what passes for news in a newsless newspaper , but moral makers against which the tabloids may voyeuristically measure their own high principles and those of their readers .sx And the royals have a particular journalistic advantage over every other public figure :sx their private lives are precisely that .sx Each tabloid has its own Man The Royals Trust or The Woman In The Know , but the fact is that those who really do know - and they are rarely tabloid journalists or anything like - don't tell .sx If they do tell , then they stop being in the know , which is the last thing they want .sx Once a tabloid royal-watcher who had just signed a piece to the effect that Prince Edward's leaving the Royal Marines was but a step away from his appearance in the Danny La Rue Follies spent some time trying to convince me that Edward had been on the phone to him as soon as the piece appeared congratulating him on his journalistic acumen .sx I didn't believe him then , nor would I now .sx Even when the odd scandalous word does creep out of the palace it's rarely published .sx There is , for instance , a persistent rumour regarding the illicit lover apparently maintained by one of the most senior royal women .sx It has a much better provenance than most such rumours , suggesting , as it does , that one of the Mistresses of the Royal Bedchamber has been working after hours with a pair of binoculars and a notebook .sx I have yet to see it in print .sx Nor , I imagine , will I unless the parties concerned choose to make it public .sx The precedent for this sort of secrecy goes back no further than the abdication crisis of 1935 .sx Then the King's private secretary met with Geoffrey Dawson , the editor of the Times , and subsequently wrote to Edward that :sx " The silence of the British Press on the subject of Your Majesty's friendship is not going to be maintained .sx " But it wasn't until the Mirror took the lead from the foreign press that the vague allusions that had been made thus far became a proper story .sx Despite a lengthy hiatus in Fleet Street's royal gossip-mongering during Victoria's reign there has been a long tradition of the press stirring the sticky royal pot .sx Then , as now , the press took sides .sx There have always been , as far as the press is concerned - and for the totally arbitrary reasons that papers apply in these matters - good royals and bad royals .sx Now we have 'caring' Diana versus 'spendthrift' Fergie , 'Princess Pushy of Kent' versus the 'charitable' Princess Royal .sx In 1788 , during the Regency crisis when papers called , I promise you , the Sun and the Star were making uncomfortable waves , The World & Fashionable Designer took the side of the Prince of Wales .sx He was so impressed that he offered to buy the paper for pounds4,000 and give Major Topham , its proprietor , a pounds400 annuity for life .sx Topham turned down the offer , but was happy to take a royal subsidy instead .sx So if Buckingham Palace was handing out subsidies today , who would get them ?sx Royalty , as far as the tabloids are concerned , is separate from politics .sx Indeed , when Prince Philip attacked double-dealing in the City a while back , and Princess Anne suggested that working mothers might not have the best deal in the world , Today ( which was then going through its Green Tory Yuppie Phase ) announced that it was not " .sx .. right for the two royals to tangle in politics .sx Neither was elected or chosen in any way for the position which led to them speaking out .sx As royals they have a vast public platform yet no responsibility to go with it .sx " Rather like the tabloid press , in fact .sx " Who is to say , " it went on , " that Prince William , currently a mischievous little boy , will not one day launch into a tirade of repellent opinions ?sx " .sx But even if the papers can't make the connection between a constitutional monarchy and the way the country is run , it's by looking laterally at a tabloid's politics that you can get a handle on its attitudes towards the royals .sx This is not to say that the Tory Sun is entirely pro-Queen or the Labour Mirror entirely anti .sx Rather , look at the Queen and her courtiers as the executives of The Royalty Corp , a nationalised industry heavily subsidised by the taxpayer , and the political equation works rather better .sx Thus the Sun , and the News of the World , its sister paper , see the royal business as a valuable national asset and one we should all be proud of , but one which should stand on its own well-shod feet .sx As a public utility it should be open to scrutiny by the public :sx no activity of its executives should go unpublished , no boardroom rift between , say , Charles , the deputy chairman and Diana , vice-president ( handshakes ) should pass without comment , no overseas fact-finding mission should be undertaken by Sarah , vice-president ( frocks ) unless the Sun thinks there is a good reason for it .sx Despite its declared voting intentions , the Mirror has always been more unashamedly monarchist than its upstart rival .sx Partly this is for historic reasons :sx for decades the Mirror was the only working-class paper and felt it incumbent upon itself to report respectfully on the bread and circuses that were laid on for its readers .sx To continue to corporate analogy , though , the Mirror sees The Royalty Corp as an essential industry and thus one that can drain the public purse without too many questions being asked .sx When Wendy Henry - a Murdoch graduate and thus a member of the school that believes that the company report should go into the minutest detail - published a picture in the Mirror Group's People of a princeling taking a leak , Robert Maxwell sacked her .sx She had gone too far .sx While other royalist papers berated the Sun for publishing the naked Andy picture , the Mirror ignored it completely .sx It is only the middle-market tabloids that are unreservedly royalist .sx The modern monarchist class-theory suggests that since Victoria's accession and the subsequent reinvention of a royal family , which until then had been generally regarded as a bunch of freeloading foreigners , our monarchy has been , essentially , a middle-class institution run by the aristocracy for middle-class consumption .sx The subsumption of Di and Fergie into that into that institution , together with the transformation of Edward and Lord Lindley into ordinary working guys has only served to confirm that belief .sx And thus the Mail and the Express support the royals not just as a glorious British example to the world , but in much the same way as they support the CBI or tax relief on mortgages .sx So , when the Mail or , much more rarely , the Express runs a disapprobationary royal story - like Demspter's recent report of the Wales' decision to use separate osteopaths , it will be more in sorrow than in anger .sx The Express's job is to report royalty ( it runs rather more straight captioned pictures of royals opening things and visiting hospital beds than the other papers ) and occasionally to remind royalty of the terms of their job description .sx The Sun reports rumours of the Princess Royal's post-marital assignations because the Sun will report rumours of anybody's post-marital assignations ; the Express does so , it suggests , because every so often it's necessary to remind our betters that we commoners have high expectations of them .sx The monarchy , then , is in no danger from the tabloids - not even the Murdoch tabloids .sx For , even if they served no other purpose , the royals will always function as another big stick with which to bash the left .sx Witness the Sun , in a rallying editorial against the New Statesman's own anti-Jubliee issue in June 1977 :sx " Out of the woodwork they crawl - the termites of the left .sx The knockers , moaners and miseries who just can't bear the thought that this weekend the Queen is the most popular lady in the land .sx " .sx And the problem for any republicans , hopeful that the Sun's latest subversion will change things , is that she probably is .sx Has the crack epidemic materialised , asks Vicky Hutchings .sx A paler shade of white .sx So what is crack ?sx Most people I asked had only a hazy idea :sx it's spiked heroin , it's cocaine mixed with sugar or salt , it's cocaine mixed with some strange chemical , it's a cheaper sort of cocaine , and , if you believe the Guardian , it's cocaine mixed with water .sx In fact , it's cocaine heated with bicarbonate of soda to remove the impurities and produce 'rocks' or 'stones' of pure crystallised cocaine , which can then be smoked to give a 'high' .sx