It has been suggested by sane, rational people that the British royal family’s deplorably cold initial response to the death of Princess Diana was the last straw and it’s now bloody well time for them to clear out.
I second the motion.
Britain’s most respected royal watcher, journalist and author Anthony Holden, suggested years ago that such a thing might happen if continued royal scandals combined with the election of a Labor Party government.
Last week, I heard the same thing from a British government official, who spoke on condition of not being identified (and beheaded).
“They should go,” the official said. “They simply haven’t a clue. The queen let days go by without saying a word about Diana. They are completely out of touch with the British people. It’s no wonder they’re so unpopular.”
I’m by no means privy to the Royal Mind, but I think Elizabeth & Co. have made it abundantly clear they consider Diana a royal mistake and are bewildered by the global gush over her passing.
After all, in a single, respected American newspaper (the Washington Post) last week, they could find references to Diana as “a featherhead” (Mary McGrory), a clever media manipulator (Roxanne Roberts) and a “fashionplate” who never really did anything but pose for pictures (Charles Krauthammer). That same paper’s Marc Fisher termed her King Farouk-like womanizing Egyptian playboy boyfriend “a deadbeat” whose filthy-rich father was trying to buy his way into British society.
From my own experience covering British royals and the social class system they represent for a number of years, I can understand why they can’t understand.
However lovely and gracious she might have been, Diana was merely someone from the lesser-known nobility, selected by the queen for royal marital breeding purposes, lacking any great intellect or higher education and working as an assistant kindergarten teacher.
Aside from her charm, her chief talents were wearing clothes well and posing for pictures. However much an appalling tragedy, her death was in the company of a rakish amour, and at the hands of a drunken chauffeur careening through city streets in excess of a hundred miles an hour.
Surely there are women who made far more important contributions to the world. The much-invoked Mother Teresa who spent decades providing refuge for the wretched and dying underclasses of Calcutta before being discovered and anointed; or Jane Goodall, who devoted her life to animals in such an endearing way she raised the consciousness of the entire world on wildlife.
So the Windsors are doubtless bewildered as to what they’ve done wrong.
Unlike them, mere kindergarten teacher or no, Diana figured out some time ago that the Middle Ages are over and that kings and queens no longer reign by Divine Right, but by public sufferance and approbation. To survive at all, they have to conduct themselves at all times in the democratic mode of the hard-working, totally egalitarian and highly popular queens Sonja of Norway and Noor of Jordan.
Instead, they always seem to be saying, “We’re royal and rather much better than you, don’t you think?”
With the unpopular Duchess Fergie, it’s been “I may behave as common as dirt, but I’m royal and rather much better than you–but please buy my cranberry juice and budgie books.”
But with Diana, it was “I’m rich and from the nobility and a royal princess, but I am just the same as you.” She could have been a Kennedy.
So the Windsors must go — if only for their own good. Though the new Labor Party government is busily granting autonomy to Scotland and Wales and eliminating hereditary peerages, I don’t think it need abolish the monarchy itself.
It’s not commonly understood, but the Windsors are not an English royal family; they’re a German one (House of Hanover and Saxe-Coburg und Gotha). When the House of Stuart’s Queen Anne succumbed in 1714, leaving no satisfactory heirs, the British government went over to Germany and asked the Hanovers if they’d come and be Britain’s royal family.
Thus we had the mad King George III, the preposterous George IV, the hated (five attempts on her life, according to British historian Paul West) Queen Victoria, the philandering Edward VII, the obnoxious Edward VIII and this pathetic lot.
All the British government need do is tell them, “You may go back where you came from now, thank you very much. And don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
Then they can seek out some present-day descendants of the Stuarts. One family with a strong line of Stuart descent, curiously, is Diana’s own Spencers.
So you could have her sons Prince William and Prince Harry stay on.
As her heirs, not Charles’.
