Gerry Adams or Prince Charles? Who is the establishment’s biggest bogeyman?

In 1994, Britons like me, who lived far from the conflict zone of Northern Ireland, heard Gerry Adams’s real voice for the first time after a six-year ban was repealed by the UK’s last majority Conservative government.

As bizarre as it might seem now, it was a big deal – and lots of people were really curious about what the Sinn Fein leader and supposed devil-incarnate might sound like, rather than the actor paid to dub him during TV interviews.

For me, an unusually politically interested 14-year-old who had also inherited freckles, Catholicism, sensitivity about the emerald isle and much else from Irish forebears, it was a particularly momentous occasion (or at least on a par with the six Spurs matches I attended that year where my lucky pants did the job).

Yet it was more than a little anticlimactic when this man, who had twice been democratically elected to Westminster but refused to take his seat, was finally allowed to be fully heard.

Far from the scary bogeyman the establishment might have us believe – in wilder moments I had imagined a darkly charismatic, silky-voiced hypnotist capable of enticing even affluent folk in the Home Counties to pick up an ArmaLite and begin waging a revolution - he sounded rather ordinary and typical of the long-suffering community from which he came.

I therefore came to the conclusion that the decision to dub his voice on TV was yet more proof that the Tories were every bit as crazy as most of the British public had by then, thankfully, realised in the wake of the poll tax, Mad Cow Disease and Black Wednesday furores.

It suggested that our seemingly unhinged rulers and their unquestioning quislings in the powerful right-wing media would do anything to make Adams’s simply spoken message of injustice appear as menacing as they could.

Now, I’m not saying this man did not do bad things or that the violence he condoned wasn’t appalling, but dubbing his voice and attacking him as an individual clearly helped to distract the British public from understanding the wider context of his struggle and see both sides of the conflict.

I am therefore reminded of this when I read and listen to all the right-wing hullabaloo about Prince Charles becoming the first member of the royal family to meet Adams.

In many ways the Prince of Wales is also a bogeyman for the establishment.

Having studied The Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph for many years, it is fairly obvious that the self-serving elite they are owned by fear this man.

This is because he threatens to speak out as king – and, worse than that, highlight injustices they’d rather sweep away from the public’s attention.

Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to restrain him and weaken his position.

Of course, they rarely criticise Charles directly because, as a member of the royal family, he represents the most popular and respected symbol of the status quo and an institution that papers like The Sun and Mail otherwise like to splurge an inordinate amount of praise on.

But they have wasted few opportunities to contrast the socially conscious heir to the throne with the “steadfast” Queen and “modest” and “popular” Prince William.

The Mail even goes out of its way to publish polls that suggest the public do not want Camilla to be queen and that Charles should step aside for William instead.

I now wonder if the government's long and expensive legal battle to prevent the Prince of Wales’s incredibly anticlimactic “black spider” letters being published were also part of a plan to make Charles seem more meddling and potentially dangerous than he is.

And, given that Gerry Adams is no longer the force he once was in Britain – although Sinn Fein seem on course to change the political landscape in the Irish Republic in a similar manner to the SNP in Scotland – it might be worth pondering whether Prince Charles is now a bigger bogeyman for the establishment than the man he dared to shake hands with today.