[LINK] "After Diana, Camilla gets a C-"

[rfmcdonald]

Toronto Star columnist Rosie Dimanno, following Charles and Camilla on their four-province tour of Canada, is decidedly unimpressed with a Charles she expects will be a placeholder king and a Camilla who just doesn't get modern monarchy. What's up with Camilla?

The problem isn't that Camilla is 62 years old and not as pretty or dazzling as the late Princess of Wales. I fear, if Diana were still around today, she might be a guest judge on So You Think You Can Dance or otherwise gutting the mystique of the institution from which she was HRH-annexed.

But at her best, even as a raw and untutored 20-year-old princess, or later on in her vengeful media-manipulating phase, Diana always inspired. She modernized a creaky contraption by proving it could still be relevant with her advocacy of causes no other royal would have touched, from AIDS to homelessness to, in her final days, anti-landmining.

Camilla's cause – and she included an event on this in Vancouver Saturday – is osteoporosis, which killed her mother. Nothing remotely wrong with drawing attention to the brittle-bones disease, but it's safe.

Diana, for all her minutely dissected faults, made princess-ing a genuine profession, just as, say, Jordan's Queen Rania, a Palestinian-born commoner, continues to do. Check out the piece she just wrote for The Daily Beast online newspaper on the impact of poverty and illiteracy on girls in the developing world.

The Duchess of Cornwall is a throwback, a regression in the annals of royalty. However engaging, personally, and no matter how happy she made her middle-age-crazy prince – happiness second to duty in his job – she personifies what many people hate about royals: the shiftlessness of to-the-palace-born or conscripted by marriage.

A friend of mine, Tracy Nesdoly, who lives in London and is significant-other to Diana biographer Andrew Morton, insightfully notes: "This is not about Camilla's lack of style but her lack of substance. Please name for me one purpose in touring royalty if not to open our eyes to something, like taking the `scary' out of AIDS. Please tell me that your actual job isn't merely to exist, when you have all the wealth and splendour with which to do more?"