Martin Hesp on Saturday What’s the secret of German prosperity?

WHEN King Charles arrived in Germany this week I was just 100 miles away from His Majesty, staring at a portrait of one of his ancestors and thinking that if I had a relative like George I, I’d do my best to bury the fact.

The painting of the old Hanoverian aristocrat hangs in a vast castle in the town of Celle, which is where you can learn all about our royal family’s German connection. A right lot they were too, according to our guide – who seemed enormously proud of the Hanoverian court, no matter how dastardly they were. Brothers pulling fast ones on one another, husbands and wives cheating left right and centre… You name it, this bunch were in it up to their elbows.

But then, you get the feeling that’s just how things were in those days. Perhaps humans aren’t very nice once you peel away a bit of our modern civilisation and sophistication.

King George I certainly wasn’t. He was an insipid looking bloke if ever there was one and lucky to marry his cousin, the rather exotic Sophia Dorothea of Celle.

But he soon tired of her and, in a state of lonely desperation, she consoled herself by having an affair with a Swedish nobleman. Bad idea. It wasn’t long before he disappeared (presumed murdered) and Sophia was banished for the rest of her life to a remote house in the countryside where she was fed well but no longer permitted any contact with her two children, or anyone else of any import. She died 30 years later, fat, bitter and lonely.

George Ludwig went on to become King of England and history has him down as a rather benign sovereign who encouraged work in architecture, science and music, commissioning the composer Handel and so on. The fact that he seems to have been a serial womaniser with a string of mistresses doesn’t really feature in the official biographies – but it does show just how unfair things were back in the day. Sophia had just one affair, which cost her lover’s life and totally ruined hers. George had dozens and was rewarded with a crown and untold power.

I wonder what King Charles thinks when he reads such tales.

People say: nothing changes… It does, but echoes keep repeating themselves down the centuries. A pretty and slightly wayward wife who got bored and fell into the arms of a courtier? Who does that remind you of?

Anyway, Charles has been in Germany this week, and so have I – although of course the monarch and his subject will have seen and experienced very different things. For example, I got to see how “normal people” live, which HRH will not.

And how do they live? Very well indeed, is the answer. When I got home, BBC news was covering the royal visit and reporting that the average German family is a whopping 20% better off than us. How can that be?

Not to put too fine a point on it, we beat them in two world wars and then, years later, they witnessed the falling of the Berlin Wall which, in economic terms, was like inheriting the debts of a bankrupt brother. Oh, and they take in loads more immigrants than we do, so we can’t shift the blame in that direction – which is so often the kneejerk reaction this side of the Channel.

But it’s not all good news in Deutschland. It can’t be. I know that because I was meant to be flying back on Monday, but couldn’t because Germany was shutdown by a transport strike. “Surely there’s some mistake,” I said to our press group’s tour guide. “Workers don’t strike in the land of Mercedes and BMWs” Down tools they did, to the extent that nothing moved for a whole 24 hours, which shocked many Germans into a state of near speechlessness.

But some self-employed stallholders in our local market were still operating, so I wandered over to take a look at all the fruit and vegetables on display. Blimey! Don’t get me going… It wasn’t the fact that the stalls were selling over 20 varieties of tomatoes alongside goodness knows what other salad stuff and veg… It was the state of

‘We beat Germany in two world wars.. but they’re 20% on average better off than us’

the items being sold which astounded me.

Everything displayed – absolutely everything – was in tip-top condition. It was as if a food magazine editor had ordered perfect fruit and veg for a photoshoot. The last time I saw anything like it in the UK was at Harrods’ food hall, where such perfection tends to cost an arm and a leg. This was in a small out-ofthe-way town market!

I wanted to run down the road and yell to King Charles: “Please Sir, could you find out how they are managing all this when we aren’t? Why have they got such amazing fruit and veg when we have barely any? Why have they got such an incredible transport network? Why haven’t their roads got potholes? How come they earn so much more than we do?

“You must have some relatives here left over from those old Hanoverian days – maybe they could let you in on the secret…”

He might reply that if he told me the secret of Vorsprung durch Technik and all that, he’d have to kill me – which is undoubtedly what his ancestors would have said.