The Royal Family, the House of Windsor, in the news and on a horse
In 1986, Prince Charles penned a letter to his pal Laurens van der Post. In it he bemoaned the “Jewish lobby” and the state of the State of Israel. None of what you are about to read suggests Charles is, like some of his fellow toffs in harbouring an intense dislike of Jews. Indeed, the Mail, which publishes the story of Charles’ letter, tells readers: “He has many prominent Jewish friends and in 2013 became the first Royal to attend a chief rabbi’s inauguration ceremony. In a speech that year, he expressed concern at the apparent rise of anti-Semitism in Britain.”
Off hand, I couldn’t name any of Charles’ Jewish pals, and scouring pictures of the perpetual heir to the throne’s skiing hols and shooting jaunts, I’m unable pick out any Jews in the happy throng. Although rumours abound that he did one fancy Barbara Streisand.
The paper also notes, “Charles has always enjoyed a close and supportive relationship with the Jewish community in Britain”. What the Jewish community is can be hard to define, but most often in community matters, it amounts to a few well-appointed, pushy knobs and knobesses serving to represent anyone and everyone who shares their faith, religion or skin tones. It’s a handy shortcut that saves on gentile shoe leather and hand sanitisers.
And so it is that Charles – not a Jew hater – writes:
‘Tried to read bit of Koran on way out and it gave me some insight into way they [Arabs] think and operate. Don’t think they could understand us through reading Bible though!”
Well, so long as you read one of the good bits, understanding an ancient religion need cost you no more than a copy of York Notes. Charles looks up from the text that consumed minutes of his busy day and continues:
“I now appreciate that Arabs and Jews were all a Semitic people originally and it is the influx of foreign, European Jews (especially from Poland, they say) which has helped to cause great problems. I know there are so many complex issues, but how can there ever be an end to terrorism unless the causes are eliminated? Surely some U.S. president has to have the courage to stand up and take on the Jewish lobby in U.S.? I must be naive, I suppose!”
“Incendiary,” says the Mail. And it is odd. Was it not the Jews returning to their God-given homeland after being forced to ‘wander’ for eons, taking in lands such as Poland where they were punished for BWJ (breathing while Jewish) with State-sanctioned murder? Was Israel not their birthright, taken from them by enemies that caused them to suffer? Can we include some of Charles’ ancestors in the list of Crusading angels who caused Jews to wander into Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland?
As for the Jewish lobby, what is that? It’s an old anti-semitic trope of a Jewish cabal running the world for their own advantage. You can be black, white, male, female, transgender, disabled, a peacenik, a veteran or whatever, but if you are a Jew, then in the eyes of Charles your campaign is driven by Jewish self-interest. It’s echoed throughout society, alluded to by the likes of Richard Ingram, who wrote in the Guardian: “I have developed a habit when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it.”
So much for the deserving Jews, one big shadowy mass of group-think. But what of the royals, specifically the blood and oil-socked kings who rule with an iron fist over many Arabs? Well, Charles rather likes them.
“Much admire some aspects of Islam,” says Charles to his Afrikaans friend. “Especially accent on hospitality and accessibility of rulers.” When they’re not booting out Jews, those Arab toffs are tops. Julie Raven nails him:
He likes Islam because monarchs aren’t answerable for the vilely hypocritical lives they lead (the drinking and whoring of Muslim monarchs compared to the treatment meted out to their subjects who indulge) and because they can divorce at their whim with no comeback. The very worst and weakest Western men are attracted by Islam – he’s no exception.
This is Charles who on Mar. 21, 2006 weighed in on the Muhammad cartoon controversy, telling an audience of more than 800 Islamic scholars at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University: “The recent ghastly strife and anger over the Danish cartoons shows the danger that comes of our failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to others.” No, not freedom of expression, a cornerstone of our democratic right. He didn’t mean that. Charles is all for the sanctity of theocratic Islam, which abhors our hard-won freedoms, stymies womanhood and raises monarchs to the pantheon of living gods. That’s what righteous Charles wants defending: the powerful.
Charles is a weak and feckless sort, a man searching for a legacy but failing to find a purpose. He’s exactly the type of right-on plodder who eventually reasons that the main cause of trouble are Jews. To wit it’s worth reminding him that his son and heir is married to Kate, of whom Iran’s Mehr News Agency warns:
“This lady’s family roots show that she is considered a Sephardic Jew from her mother’s side. Moreover the timing of the wedding and the way it was held which was based on Jewish culture verify the evidences. William’s marriage as the inheritor of the crown to a Jewish girl will leave the future of Britain to the hands of the couple’s Jewish children.” *
Yeah. They got you Charles. They got you good…
Posted: 13th, November 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Royal Family | Comment
This BBC Breaking News alert where @BBCSimonMcCoy announces when Kate Middleton is having her birthday is PEAK SIMON MCCOY pic.twitter.com/GKb4nQOp7J
— Scott Bryan (@scottygb) October 17, 2017
BBC News anchor Simon McCoy has BREAKING NEWS:
“We’ve just got this coming in from Kensington Palace, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are delighted to confirm they are expecting a baby in April.
“Now bearing in mind they announced she was pregnant back in September and it was thought she was around two or three months pregnant, I’m not sure how much news this really is but anyway…
It’s April so clear your diaries, get the time booked off because that’s what I’m doing. That’s news just coming in from Kensington Palace.”
Simon McCoy knows what’s coming. Having delivered the Windsors’ press release that another one of our betters is on the way, he can expect to be reporting LIVE on Kate Middleton’s womb to a captivated nation:
Posted: 18th, October 2017 | In: Key Posts, Royal Family, TV & Radio | Comment
Prince George has started school. His big moment is all over the papers. He’s “His royal Shyness” on the Mirror and Mail’s front pages, and “Heir to learn” on the Sun’s.
The Mirror says he looked nervous. The Express says he was “all smiles”.
It all depends on how you decode the look George is giving his new headmistress. Head down, eyes fixed as Miss curtsies to her new pupil, who’ll be treated the same as everyone else.
Tom Jamieson muses: “Please release me Sire…please, it’s been almost two hours now…” “Crush her, crush her George like you will all the peasants.”
Shy and nervous in the Mirror
All smiles in the Express
‘Glum’ in the Sun
‘Wobbly’ in the Mail
Miss Kate-alike in the Mail
Best of luck, George! No pressure.
Posted: 8th, September 2017 | In: Royal Family, Tabloids | Comment
Look out Bournemouth, here come the Saudis! Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz is most displeased with the treatment meted out to his eldest son, Prince Abudullah, as he dined with his entourage at Marbella’s Finca Besaya eatery. Spain’s Territorial Security Unit raided the place, reportedly acting on a tip-off that members of the royals’ security detail were not carrying the required permits.
The prince’s party were asked for IDs and interrogated, and, as one eyewitness claims, “treated like terrorists”. For a double-whammy, the armed police then raided another restaurant, El Ancla, where Prince Abdullah’s daughter, Princess Susu, was celebrating her 17th birthday, again the story goes that two of her bodyguards had not been properly certificated.
So incensed is King Salman by the police’s actions that he’s threatening to pack up his millions – his presence is estimated to be worth €100,000 a day to the local economy; and that’s just in handbags – and never to return to Spain.
Well, that’s if you read EuroNews and believe my source who claims to be close to the King’s circle. The local Costa del Sol news paints a very different picture:
A National Police inspection of the private security guard detail of the Saudi royal family, carried out last week at a restaurant and a private property in Marbella, revealed that four guards had no license to act as security guards and were carrying blank-firing pistols, not real ones. Police officials said a representative of the Saudi royal family thanked the department and told it that the guards would be fired [no pun intended].
El Mundo also reports the fiasco as a triumph of Spanish policing – via Google Translate:
The National Police has detected irregularities in the escort service of members of the Saudi royal family who spends their holidays in Marbella when they discover that the four men in charge of their security do not have the professional qualification required to carry out this function…
In the first, Princess Susu celebrated her 17th birthday and in the second her father, Prince Abdullah, son of King Salman of Saudi Arabia, dined with his family to fire his vacation. Faced with this situation, Prince Abdullah lodged a complaint with the Spanish Ministry of Interior for a supposed vexatious treatment of the police to his family and his entourage . The officers, according to their version, came to gag their daughter. For their part, escorts of the royal delegation denounced that the police action was excessive and that they asked for passports and documentation without allowing them to give any explanation.
The police argue that the inspections were carried out with “absolute respect”, without “at any time” occurring “no violence or intimidation” . He also underlined that the identifications were carried out by plainclothes agents and uniformed police officers to avoid “any confusion in the inspection”.
The troublesome thing for the heavy-handed Spaniards is that a source tells me that when the French upset the King a few years ago – he wanted a public beach reserved exclusively for his use; locals objected with a 100,000-name petition – he left and vowed never to return to his family’s seafront home in Vallauris, preferring to take his summer hols at his palace on the beach in Tangier. He’s not holidayed in France since.
So with France and Spain out, Bournemouth it is.
Posted: 6th, September 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Royal Family | Comment
I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since Princes Diana died #peoplesprincess
Posted: 1st, September 2017 | In: Royal Family | Comment
Where were you 20 years ago when Dodi Fayed died in a car crash whilst on holiday with Princess Diana, a divorced mum-of-two?
The marking of the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death is a therapeutic process. Just as she was presented as the vulnerable woman abused by the country’s old values as she opened up her heart and talked about her issues on the telly, we too are now in need. The Mirror, one day on from its exclusive with Diana Inc.’s Paul Burrell, leads with: “Harry: all of us lost somebody.”
Diana, a totem for all our pain and woes, in whose aftermath emotionalism replaced resolve and conviction, is the saviour of us and them. “True disbelief, then the grief hit us hard,” says Fiona Philips. “Popularity of the monarchy is down to her,” says Brian Reade. In the rush to emote, the Daily Star puts the following words into the mouths of Diana’s sons: “We wish she was here say Harry & Wills as they visit Diana memorial garden.”
She can’t be in her own memorial garden for reasons all too obvious. But we can feel her, right? Because in the age of uncertainty, feeling is everything.
Posted: 31st, August 2017 | In: News, Royal Family, Tabloids | Comment
Just in case you hadn’t heard, it’s 20 years since the death of Princess Diana. The Diana Industry is in full cry. In today’s instalment, former royal servant Paul Burrell is seen eying the site of the car cash that killed his boss in Paris and sharing his “troubling questions” over her death.
Paul’s thoughts are front-page news in the Mirror. And on pages 4 and 5 you get a lot more of them. Burrell, who has made a career from being Diana’s “Rock”, says, “My heart tells me it was a terrible accident.” To say nothing of the countless books, coroner’s reports, police inquiry, TV specials and a million to-deadline opinions about the car crash.
Paul then takes time out to gives us a city tour. He says he “never realised how close the Eiffel Tower was” to the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, where Diana died, an underpass he “never realised” was so small. “Now I realise it [the Tower] must have been the last thing she saw before the crash,” says Paul.
Having realised much and shared her last view, Burrell then shares Diana’s demise, albeit mentally. “I dreamt last night I would crash and die in the exact same place,” says Burrell. Not all dreams come true. And Paul is alive to place a “touching” card on the bridge. It says – and it’s all written in easy-to-read capital letters:
YOU WILL BE WITH ME FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE … AND ONE DAY WE WILL BE RE-UNITED AND SIT AND LAUGH AND LOVE.
YOUR ROCK.
P.
Always nice when a staff member enjoys their work, but Paul seems a tad besotted with Diana. He says it took a few hours before he realised “she had left me”. In the hospital where she died, coppers showed him the room where Diana is lying, her hair washed, her body carrying the scent of formaldehyde – “I can still smell it, like I still smell her perfume, Hermes 24 Faubourg.” The Mirror plays along, saying Burrell was “the first person to see her body” (if so, who washed her hair and declared her dead?). He says he entered the room to “stare death in the face”. Lest you think facing the Grim Reaper something you do when faced with your own mortality, Burrell opines: “I’d lost my reason for being.”
But he found a new one, and whether it be talking about Diana in the tabloids, writing about Diana in your book, eating ‘roo gonads on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!. judging would-be Dianas on Australian Princess, working out anagrams of ‘CROK’ on Countdown, singing on Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes, or shopping on Celebrity Big Brother, Burrell’s soldiered on.
Posted: 30th, August 2017 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts, News, Royal Family, Tabloids | Comment
It’s the Daily Diana, and the Sun leads with Sun readers remembering the day Princess Diana died 20 years ago. The story is headlined “Diana AND ME”. Because it’s all about ME.
Reader Louise Voss says, “I went into labour with my daughter as she died.” Louise “worked out” that just as the car carrying Diana slammed into a tunnel wall in Paris, she had her first contraction, and daughter Gracie began her journey down her own sort of tunnel. Spooky! ”
“Gracie was born the next day, and we always told her she was the reincarnation of Diana,” says Louise. Although Diana wasn’t dead yet, and only soap actors get to be the reincarnation of someone still alive. It detracts little from the drama to note that Louise never met Diana – well, not in her previous lifetime.
As the paparazzi and land mine charities dash over to see Gracie, we meet others, like Jo who says of her late sister: “That night marked Diana’s death – and the beginning of my sister’s decline.”
Tess agreed to marry her boyfriend the day before news of Diana’s death broke. She says the day was a “true rollercoaster”.
Marianne Berry, a nurse who like Jo and Tess never met Diana, offers context. A newsflash appeared on the telly: “We thought it was the announcement of World War Three. Then the newsreader says Dodi had died, and Diana was on her way to hospital. Another nurse came over and joined us and we watched the horror unfold.”
Peter Kay dodges the bombs to recall that he heard the news via a note on the fridge from his mom. It read: “Princess Diana dead. Shepherd’s pie in fridge.”
It’s what she would have wanted.
Posted: 24th, August 2017 | In: News, Royal Family, Tabloids | Comment
It’s Diana-mania all over again in the tabloids as papers mark the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death.
The Mirror leads with a Diana pullout, four pages of revision featuring the wedding day kiss on the Buckingham Palace balcony (awwww!); Diana getting Charles’s name wrong at the altar (d’oh!); Charles mentally repeating “Must not call her Camilla” over and over (cheating, lying bastard!); and how the couple, as Marje Proops told us on July 30 1981, “could have been quite alone. It was look of love and longing” – her love for him and his longing to be Camilla’s tampon.
Too harsh on Charles, the poor lamb? Nah. The Press are all diving on the swine. The Express, with the vanishing of Madeleine McCann deemed a story no longer to be of much interest, leads with the pre-Maddy blonde Diana and news that she “saved” the Royal Family. This follows news that, when polled, most time-rich Britons who respond to YouGov polls think Charles is unfit to be King.
The Mail begins its Daily Diana by looking at a poll. This one says only a third of Britons think Charles is worth his salt and 14% think Camilla should be Queen (yeah, that many). How many think Diana was murdered is not investigated, but it might be more than the number who think Charles should put his hair in a bun and his **** in a toaster.
Over on the Sun’s cover, big news is that Diana was not in love with Dodi Fayed. This we know because Michael Gibbins, her private secretary, believes she was simply “having a lovely summer at somebody else’s expense”. Diana was freeloader? A tart? “When the summer was over, everything would have disintegrated,” says Gibbons. He then adds: “If she’d lived she would have been looking for other things – and rushing into my office saying why hadn’t I found them for her?” Although her husband Dodi might have been with her, carrying their child, little Michael Paul Burrell-Gibbins and his twin sister Fergie.
In tomorrow’s papers: why Diana loved the paparazzi.
Posted: 21st, August 2017 | In: News, Royal Family, Tabloids | Comment
To mark the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death, we’re seen lots of photos of the funeral procession. In today’s Mail, we see the family shot of the young princes, William and Harry, their father Prince Charles, Diana’s brother Earl Spencer and the Duke of Edinburgh. The story of why the princes were walking behind their mother’s coffin seems confused.
The Mail on Sunday says: “The decision for the boys to join the cortege was not made until an eve-of-funeral family supper when their grandfather, Prince Philip, promised them: ‘If you walk, I’ll walk.”
We know this was an act of selflessness by the caring Duke because on the ITV documentary Diana: The Day Britain Cried, The Queen’s senior aide Sir Malcolm Ross, opined:
“And I understand that it was at a family supper on the Friday night in Buckingham Palace that the decision was made and Prince Philip, after some discussion, said to the boys, ‘I’ll walk if you walk’.”
But talking to Newsweek magazine, Prince Harry tells us:
“My mother had just died, and I had to walk a long way behind her coffin, surrounded by thousands of people watching me while millions more did on television. I don’t think any child should be asked to do that, under any circumstances. I don’t think it would happen today.”
And there’s Earl Spencer, who told the BBC is was a “very bizarre and cruel thing” for Diana’s two sons to be told to walk behind her body. He says the Palace “lied” to him, telling them the boys had wanted to walk behind the coffin, which, he says, they did not want to do.
Not that anything about Diana is new. We’ve heard it all before, sort of.
In 2015, Hello magazine reported:
When the late Princess Diana died in 1997 her sons William and Harry did not want to walk behind the coffin, but Philip thought they would regret it later and told them: “If you like, I’ll walk with you.”
In 2007, the Daily Express told its readers:
Vanity Fair also prints excerpts of The Diana Chronicles, by former magazine editor Tina Brown, which reveal how the Princess and the Duke of Edinburgh clashed before her divorce from Prince Charles.
Philip is claimed to have threatened to remove her HRH title if she failed to behave properly.
But the Princess is said to have responded by informing the Duke that her title as Lady, referring to the lineage of the Spencer family, was a lot older than his. Ms Brown also claims Philip cajoled Princes William and Harry to walk with him behind Diana’s coffin at her funeral, overruling objections from her brother Earl Spencer.
In his Diaries, Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alistair Campbell, noted:
William believed the plan was designed to appeal to the media. Campbell writes: “William was refusing to speak to anyone and he was consumed by a total hatred of the media … I sensed the boys were holding firm, and they seemed to feel it was being done for the media and the public, not for their mother.”
The Mirror reported in 2011: “William and Harry walked behind Diana’s coffin to prevent a mob attacking Prince Charles.”
Such are the facts.
At least no-one is still harping on about her having been murdered. Which she wasn’t. Right?
Posted: 20th, August 2017 | In: News, Royal Family | Comment
Prince Philips has retired from public service. The Prince has completed his final public engagement, of which there have been 22,219 since 1952.
But over in the Daily Telegraph no work means you’re dead!
The story goes:
The Duke of Edinburgh, the longest-serving consort to a monarch in British history, has died at the age of XX, Buckingham Palace has announced.
“Prince Philip, whom the Queen described as her ‘strength and stay’ during her record-breaking reign, passed away XXXXXXX
“FILL IN DETAILS
“He will be given a royal ceremonial funeral in line with his wishes, which is expected to take place in seven days’ time.””
Clock’s ticking, Phil…
Posted: 3rd, August 2017 | In: Broadsheets, Royal Family | Comment
Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower didn’t want us to know about King Edward VIII’s plans for peace with Adolf Hitler and Nazis. Papers released by The National Archives considered “too difficult, too sensitive” include a 1953 “top secret” memo from Churchill discussing German telegrams carrying reports by Nazi-sympathiser the Duke of Windsor, as Edward VIII was known after he abdicated in 1936.
“He is convinced that had he remained on throne war would have been avoided and describes himself as firm supporter of a peaceful compromise with Germany,” says one telegram from Portugal, where the duke was staying in July 1940. “Duke believes with certainty that continued heavy bombing will make England ready for peace.”
Edward ‘teaching the Queen how to give the Nazi salute’
Edward abdicated so he could marry an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson. The couple set up home in France, but when World War II broke out they moved to Spain. The government in Madrid, formally neutral but sympathetic to Germany, asked for guidance from Berlin as to what should be done with them. German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop replied, asking if they could be kept there. Then he ordered a watch on their house.
Ribbentrop’s interest was piqued when he was told, a few days later, that in private “Windsor spoke strongly against Churchill and against this war.” While he considered what to do, the duke and duchess made their way to Portugal, where they made similar comments. The Nazis decided to act.
“The duke should return to Spain under all circumstances,” Ribbentrop wrote, adding that they should then be “persuaded or forced” to stay there. His plan was then to offer the duke “the granting of any wish,” including “the ascension of the English throne.”
Churchill duly made the Nazi Windsor governor of the Bahamas.
When the Windsors were reluctant to leave Europe, Churchill threatened Edward, who held honorary military rank, with court-martial. Ribbentrop, anxious not to let his prize escape, launched Operation Willi to persuade the Windsors to return to Spain, kidnapping them if necessary. But despite sabotage attempts and bomb threats, the Germans failed.
The plan was “to persuade the duke to leave Lisbon in a car as if he were going on a fairly long pleasure jaunt, and then to cross the border at a specified place, where Spanish secret police will ensure a safe crossing,” according to a note sent to Ribbentrop.
You can read more on how close the UK came to being overrun by Nazis in this great story on Flashbak.
Posted: 21st, July 2017 | In: News, Politicians, Royal Family | Comment
“Congratulations on your pay rise ma’am,” say the firefighters to Her Majesty the Queen.
Congratulations on your pay rise ma’am. pic.twitter.com/TcdDktFN8o
— Beaubodor (@beaubodor) June 28, 2017
Spotter: the terrific @beaubodor
Posted: 29th, June 2017 | In: Royal Family | Comment
Is Her Majesty signalling her political views at the State Opening of Parliament? As Elizabeth Rex delivered a Queen’s Speech, the content of which was thinner than the Jews4Corbyn contact book, you couldn’t help but notice her hat, which looked not a lot unlike the European Union fag.
Is she a Remainer?
Posted: 21st, June 2017 | In: Politicians, Royal Family | Comments (2)
To the Tower of London, where a woman has dropped her glove close to one of the serving soldiers who guard the place. Did she toss the glove to see what the soldier would do? A Beefeater approaches:
Humour works better:
Posted: 3rd, June 2017 | In: Royal Family, Strange But True | Comment
When Pippa Middleton married James Matthews reporting was split: he was all money; she was all looks. Stood in the supermarket queue a woman saw me looking at the Hello! magazine cover featuring Pippa and her sister Kate (who she?) and asked: “Which one do you think’s more attractive?”
Pippa Middleton is due to tie the knot to a wealthy financier today in what is expected to be the society event of the year. The Duchess of Cambridge’s younger sister will marry Chelsea-based multi-millionaire James Matthews at a small, private affair with reportedly just 150 people invited.
The Sun:
Being known for your arse make you pretty unthreatening, no, and thus all the more likeable. In the much lampooned Pippa’s Party Tips, the second Middleton gel showed an apparent acceptance of her role as nice but dim, serving up statements of the bleedin’ obvious beneath a stock photo smile.
But what the Press really love about Pippa is that they give the papers a chance to feature their own photos of Prince George and Princess Charlotte.
Posted: 21st, May 2017 | In: Broadsheets, Royal Family, Tabloids | Comment
Should Prince William seeks another leisure pursuit or hobby he can present as a working job – an actual job – he can always work as a commercial pilot. We read in the Washington Post:
King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands prefers a less leisurely activity. He works as a “guest pilot” for a commercial airline.
The King, who flies KLM’s Fokker 70 planes, tells Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf.
“You have an aircraft, passengers and crew. You have responsibility for them. You can’t take your problems from the ground into the skies. You can completely disengage and concentrate on something else. That, for me, is the most relaxing part of flying.”
How about, Wills? At the very least it’s a good excuse for another holiday?
Posted: 18th, May 2017 | In: Royal Family, Strange But True | Comment
Not long before he became King of Thailand, Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn was on a trip to Munich, Germany. He mooched about a shopping centre with a woman. That’s him in the natty yellow crop top, showing off the tattoos on his tum-tum and back.
Thanks to Somsak Jeamteerasakul, “a prominent Thai historian and critic of the monarchy who lives in France”, the video of Maha’s shopping trip has appeared on Facebook, as The New York Times reports. Apparently, the King has had the video blocked in Thailand. He’s also told Facebook to remove the video or else.
Under the country’s lese-majeste laws, people can be jailed for 15 years for insulting monarchy. But is it an insult merely to show the monarch out and about? And won’t all the cool kids be dressed like this next year?
The video has been blocked in Thailand but was still available outside the country on Tuesday.
Facebook, which opened an office in Thailand in 2015, declined to answer questions about its operations in the country or the pages that the government wants to remove. A spokeswoman, Clare Wareing, said only that the company’s policy was to comply with requests by governments to restrict access to content that officials believed violated local laws.
“When we receive such a request, we review it to determine if it puts us on notice of unlawful content,” Ms. Wareing said in an emailed statement. “If we determine that it does, then we make it unavailable in the relevant country or territory and notify people who try to access it why it is restricted.”
Spotter: The New York Times.
Posted: 17th, May 2017 | In: Royal Family, Strange But True | Comment
We first encountered pictures of Kate Middleton’s naked breasts when the French edition of celebrity magazine Closer published the grainy images captured on a long lens in 2012. Today the Mirror leads with news that Kate is seeking £1.3m in damages. So traumatic was it to see Kate’s baps in the tabs that in a French court lawyers for Kate and Prince William say the episode evokes haunting memories of Princess Diana’s “Paparazzi nightmare”.
Among other things, the images show Kate removing her bathing suit and slapping sunscreen to her husband’s back.
Six people are accused of beaching privacy: Closer magazine editor Laurence Pieau, La Provence Publishing Director Marc Auburtin, whose paper also published the snaps, Chief Executive Ernesto Mauri, and photographers Cyril Moreau, Dominique Jacovides and Valerie Suau, according to BBC News.
The Sun, which published pictures of a naked Prince Harry, sets a sympathetic scene:
Kate and William had escaped on holiday in France in September 2012, a little more than a year into their marriage, when the images were taken.
So much, then, for “Workshy Wills“, the Sun’s nickname for the Prince, who last month was telling us all to loosen up. He was “escaping” not skiving. Wills and the other two parts of the Golden Triangle of Palace PR – Prince Harry and Kate – are not the epitome of an unaccountable elite, but in it with us.
The British Press are all on the Windsors side in this one, partly because some organs enjoy watching Britishers making the French squirm and partly because the story can illustrate their own sense of decency, righteousness and strict moral code. It’s not often the gutter press get to look down on something lower, so the likes of the Sun, Star, Mail and Mirror are not going to pass up the opportunity to posture, salute and preen.
But what;s wrong with the photos?
Kate and Wills – the couple who showoff family photos of their children, let us look around their palaces in TV documentaries designed to show their ordinariness, jet about the world adopting worthy interventionist causes, talk to showbiz magazines and cut through the pomp and ermine to get closer to the people – crave all the trappings of celebrities. With no Empire and no political role, it is through celebrity that Kate and Wills, and so too the Royals at large, can achieve a sense of authority. The topless photos are just part of the celebrification. The French see that. We don’t.
When push comes to shove, Kate and Wills have pulled up the red rope. They aren’t the UK’s Kim and Kanye or even Posh and Becks. They are not special by anything other than birth. If we see that then the fall out from their reaction to topless photos might cause more Royal pain in the long run.
Posted: 3rd, May 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Royal Family | Comment
It’s the third day of the Sun’s Prince William expose. On Tuesday the paper led with news that Wills had ‘sloped off’ to the Swiss Alps to pranny about his pals on a lads’ holiday, where he met an Australian model called Sophie Taylor. So much the norm for the super-rich. But the Sun was aghast, saying that Wills should have been at a Commonwealth Day service with the rest of his kin.
Over pages 4 and 5, we saw Wills ‘sloping off again’, ‘snubbing’ the service at Westminster Abbey. Wills does a ‘high skive’ palm slap with Sophie as he ‘chills ‘with ‘topless model’ Sophie and his mates.
On Wednesday it was more of the same. There was Wills on the Sun’s cover page, his lips pursed in disapproval as he stared into the paparazzo’s lens. Wills has an ambivalent relationship with the Press. The photo-ops that make him looks good and chummy with the hol polloi are great; the ones where he’s seen larking about for the 30-plus weeks of the year in which he isn’t ‘working’ as a military-lite soldier and celebrity lifesaver are undesirable and invasive. The narrative is that the paps did for his mother, but what really hurt William’s mother was his father, cheating Charles, who refereed to Princess Diana as ‘Diana the Martyr‘ as she carved out a life for herself that involved more than being the Windsor clan’s latest ‘brood mare‘.
And it keeps coming. Wills is ‘Throne Idle’. He is – yet again – ‘sloping off’, having performed ‘just 13 royal duties’ this year (although it’s at least a couple more if you include telling the secretary to tell the nanny to wipe Prince George’s arse and smiling at Kate in public) to the Queen’s 24.
Over pages 6 and 7, we see Wills in ‘Boogie-wonderland’ getting ‘crown on it’ at Verbier’s Farinet club. We hear from a ‘stunned’ onlooker who “couldn’t believe” Wills was ‘gyrating to a rap song with lyrics about smoking cannabis’. It’s unbelievable. Where’s the future King’s sense of tradition? What happened to getting goofed on opiates, impregnating peroxide-tinted serfs, murdering dumb animals and giving Nazs salutes? It was good enough for his ancestors, so why not Wills? The snob.
“William clearly isn’t interested in taking his role seriously and I really wonder if he wants to be king,” says the chief executive of anti-monarchy group Republic.”He’s not living up to the hopes that people had of him and does seem to be taking all this for granted,’ adds a ‘Royal historian’.
And so to Thursday’s Sun‘s lead story. We hear that Sophie did a slut drop’ dance in a rarified Swiss club. On pages 4 and 5, we learn that Wills was ‘cavorting on a club dance floor with two beauties’. We also learn that the slut drop is a dance move ‘made famous of Geordie Shore’, the TV show in which orange-skinned Geordies shag on camera and then read each others tattoos by the light of their teeth.
What it all amounts to is not very much at all. Unless you consider Kate, the missing part in all her husband’s life of privilege and privacy. The Sun invites its agony aunt Deidre to ‘imagine’ what Kate would write about her husband. Imaginary Kate is worried that her ‘boring and ‘balding’ husband ‘has been pictured with his hands all over some girl’. She wonders, ‘Has the magic gone?’ Above all she is terrified he’s turning into his father. We hope, of course, that Kate learns from Diana, a woman who touched the shunned and sick (literally) and attempted with no little success to turn a life of public virtue and private vice into something the subjects can look up to.
Over to you, Kate…
Posted: 16th, March 2017 | In: Key Posts, Royal Family, Tabloids | Comment
An American called Allan V. Evans of Colorado USA has taken out a big ad in the Times to say he’s the rightful king of Britain and intends to seize power.
Posted: 1st, March 2017 | In: Broadsheets, Key Posts, Royal Family, Strange But True | Comment
When Saudi Arabia’s king travels to Indonesia he’ll have packed 506 tons of stuff into his bags. As well as spare knickers, travel plugs and mints, King Salman bin Abdul Aziz will travel with two Mercedes limousines and two elevators?
It’s the first time the King has visited Indonesia for 46 years. He was meant to go earlier but by the time the hand luggage was sorted and he’d found the wife he wasn’t sure if he’d packed or not, the 1980s and 1990s had come and gone.
The Washington Post looks on:
The Jakarta Post reports that the Saudi group will total about 1,500 people, including 10 ministers, 25 princes and at least 100 security personnel.
Not all of the staff will in the hold.
Posted: 27th, February 2017 | In: Royal Family, Strange But True | Comment
Prince Harry has taken an HIV test to promote World Aids Day. It works. The papers are all covering the blood letting as Harry tours Barbados. It helps, of course, that Harry was not alone, accompanied as he was by pop star Rihanna.
This was his second public test. In July Harry took an HIV test on Facebook live. The Guardian said Harry “admitted to being nervous before the result came back negative”. The results of yesterday’s test are, as yet, unpublished.
The Telegraph reported that following Harry’s test the Terrence Higgins Trust saw a fivefold increase in orders for testing kits in the days after.
All good, then. A man who seems to live an airbrushed life, Harry has found a use and a use has been found for Harry.
PS: Of course the tabloids need a twist on what was a pretty routine afternoon’s PR work for Harry, so we get the Daily Express saying Rihanna was “flirty” with Harry and talked about not having sex in a barber’s hop; the Sun punning “Wince Harry”; and the Mail asking “Is it really worth testing 11 million Britons for HIV?”
Posted: 2nd, December 2016 | In: Reviews, Royal Family | Comment
