Paul Thomas: Wills shows true colours

No one who writes for a living really believes a picture is worth a thousand words, let alone 10,000, as was originally asserted.

Ten thousand words represent a fair amount of effort and angst. As Monty Python pointed out, it's not just a matter of choosing the words; you also have to put them in the right order.

But I have to admit the photograph of the future King of New Zealand cheering for the Lions last weekend said it all about the sheer, anachronistic perversity of having a foreigner as our head of state.

I have nothing against Prince William, who seems remarkably pleasant and well-adjusted, considering his loss and the poisonous sensationalism that continues to envelop his family like a London fog.

It's natural that William, being British, should cheer for the Lions. It's anything but natural that in due course he'll become our head of state, but if it happens, it won't be his fault. It will be our fault.

And it was fittingly coincidental that William should show his true colours just as the nuclear ships issue came roaring back to life.

The political sparring that ensued suggested two things. First, the Government will do its utmost to make this a key issue in the election. If Labour has its way, the phrase "gone by lunchtime" will define this election as the dancing Cossacks did the one of 1975.

Secondly, it seems we're way past the point where we can have a proper debate about it and its effect on our international relationships, particularly with the United States. As soon as it's mentioned, someone reminds us the policy is central to our national identity and independence, the unsubtle implication being that to question it is to out oneself as a US lap-dog.

In this week's Listener Phil Goff describes the policy as "part of the way we see ourselves, part of the way we promote ourselves to the outside world".

The idea that the no nukes stance has persuaded the world we're a stalwartly independent nation is debatable. In my experience, it's just as likely our independence will be questioned because we have the Union Jack on our flag and our head of state lives in another country.

Why are so many of our leaders unperturbed by this confusing symbolism, which compromises our independence for no obvious gain, while treating as sacrosanct a policy that arguably does significant harm to the national interest?

The answer, I suspect, is that this apparently bizarre contradiction contains something for almost everyone.

The older, Anglocentric, conservative members of the population have the monarchy, a security blanket enabling them to believe that the world hasn't quite gone to hell in a hand-cart. The younger, more nationalistic and self-confident members of the population have the no-nukes policy enabling them to believe we are a force to be reckoned with.

I missed the excitement surrounding the declaration of nuclear freedom. At the time I was living in Europe, where the Cold War was an inescapable reality. Travelling around West Germany, you got used to RAF Tornadoes howling overhead and military convoys clogging country lanes.

In West Berlin, an oasis of freedom and fur coats, the burghers and bohemians lived it up in the knowledge that everything they held dear would vanish in a muzzle flash if the Cold War turned hot.

Which didn't seem entirely out of the question: several years of painstaking negotiations over intermediate-range nuclear weapons had collapsed in mutual acrimony. The US and its allies were determined to deploy a new generation of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe to redress the imbalance first identified by the West German Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt.

When it wasn't muttering dark threats about "taking the necessary measures to guarantee the integrity of the homeland", the USSR was muttering dark threats against the Polish underground trade union movement, Solidarity.

Given that his political career was founded on an eagerness to confront the USSR once and for all, Europeans preferred not to contemplate Ronald Reagan's reaction if the Soviets intervened to crush Solidarity as they'd done in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. That's history now, as is the Rainbow Warrior bombing, a deadly act of state terrorism which took place before David Lange bested Jerry Falwell in the Oxford Union debate.

But despite that criminal outrage and France's subsequent bullying and dishonesty, we eventually made up. Now when Helen Clark goes to Paris she has to put up with Jacques Chirac slobbering over her hand like a grotesque parody of the Latin lover.

Meanwhile our relationship with the US remains frozen in the icy fallout from the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act, 1987.

Who cares if our future king cheers for the opposition as long as he wears a no nukes T-shirt under his Lions jersey?