Opinion

Long-term resident

MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE

By now there can­not be a liv­ing soul in Cat­alo­nia who is un­aware of last month’s pass­ing and en­tomb­ment of Queen Eliz­a­beth II, broad­cast with verve all over the world (here her face was all over the cov­ers of the gos­sip mag­a­zines, as if she were just one more di­vorced model or TV chef). For me (and prob­a­bly many other UK cit­i­zens born after 1952) she was a kind of fig­urine who popped into view at reg­u­lar in­ter­vals over seven decades, doing the full gamut of the queeney things that fell to her lot: vis­it­ing Com­mon­wealth coun­tries, host­ing cer­e­mo­nial din­ners, greet­ing new prime min­is­ters, ask­ing peo­ple she didn’t know from Adam what they did, and so on. What­ever your views on monar­chies, it can­not be de­nied that she did her job as pro­fes­sion­ally as any other con­sci­en­tious em­ployee, al­beit while liv­ing in the type of clover most hard-work­ing peo­ple never get to sam­ple a whiff of (I once came across one of her em­ploy­ees, who was on the se­cu­rity de­tail at the palace; “the wine’s so good,” he said, “you can fuck­ing smell it from a dis­tance.”).

But what I re­ally re­mem­ber about the royal fam­ily are the cracks which began to ap­pear in their pre­vi­ously im­preg­nable cara­pace as soon as the Queen’s chil­dren came of age: Ann mar­ried an army of­fi­cer called Mark Phillips, the two of them laugh­ingly ad­mit­ting in their first in­ter­view to­gether that they never read books ex­cept for trash they picked up for long-haul flights; Phillips was soon pub­licly es­cort­ing younger women into night clubs (or was it the other way round?); and while a bored Princess Diana roller-skated to the sound of Duran Duran along the cor­ri­dors of Buck House, Charles main­tained trysts with an older woman called Camilla Parker-Bowles, which even­tu­ally led to the un­for­get­table wish on the part of the heir to the throne to be rein­car­nated as a Tam­pax (he used the brand name) so that he could be in­side her for ex­tended pe­ri­ods of time; mean­while, he was busy mak­ing con­tro­ver­sial state­ments about mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture, set­ting up an al­ter­na­tive food and med­i­cine com­pany (’Duchy Orig­i­nals’) even as he claimed that cof­fee en­e­mas could cure can­cer; and then, of course there was Prince An­drew’s mar­riage to Sarah Fer­gu­son, she of the sucked toes on the beach (and sex while preg­nant with a regal child) cour­tesy of an Amer­i­can bil­lion­aire; while An­drew, he of the pho­to­graph taken with his arm round a 17 year old girl at the Lon­don house of con­victed paed­erast Jef­frey Ep­stein, he claimed he couldn’t re­call that mo­ment at all (he later be­stowed an out-of-court for­tune on the al­leged vic­tim); and then there has been Ed­ward, who started a TV pro­duc­tion com­pany in 1993 (Ar­dent Pro­duc­tions) which lost money hand over fist be­fore clos­ing down in 2009 with as­sets to­talling €45.

In short, the image of the British Royal fam­ily, with the sin­gle ex­cep­tion of Eliz­a­beth II, has been that of just about any other dys­func­tional fam­ily, with its in­fi­deli­ties, failed busi­nesses, crack­pot ideas etc., with the dif­fer­ence that in this case each and every dys­func­tion has been under the piti­less mag­ni­fy­ing glass of the tabloid press. By com­par­i­son, the Span­ish royal fam­ily - which, if any­thing, has been con­sid­er­ably more dys­func­tional - was pro­tected for years by laws that could jail scan­dal-mon­ger­ing jour­nal­ists for up to a decade. Not any more: for those who would care to see this long-term cover-up un­cov­ered, all you need to do is watch the new HBO Max doc­u­men­tary ’Sal­var al Rey’, in the com­fort of your own homes.

opin­ion

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