Down With the Royals (7 page)

This episode is a reminder that the Windsors associate with tyrants
by choice
, a fact demonstrated by how often Charles visits absolute monarchies with terrible human rights records; he doesn’t even seem to mind that the Saudis bear a heavy responsibility for exporting Wahabbism, a particularly unpleasant form of Islam which imposes barbaric punishments under sharia law.
The cost of these jaunts to taxpayers is stupendous: in 2011, a visit by Prince Charles and Camilla to the Middle East and Africa cost £460,387 after they chartered a private plane for the entire trip.
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Nothing is too undignified for the UK’s future head of state: in February 2014, Charles took part in a ceremony in a stadium in Riyadh hosted by the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, where he joined in a sword dance.
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In Saudi Arabia, swords are generally used for a more sinister purpose: a few months after Charles’s visit, Amnesty International documented twenty-three executions, most of them beheadings, in just three weeks; they included two sets of brothers on 18 August, all of whom claimed to have been tortured during interrogation.
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On the same trip, Charles visited Qatar, which has been described together with the Saudi kingdom as ‘major culprits in the exploitation
and ill-treatment of migrant workers’, who are often subjected to financial exploitation, beatings, torture, rape and execution.
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No matter: Charles’s connections with the Emir of Qatar came in useful when he took a dislike to a £3 billion scheme by a London-based architect, Christian Candy, working with a Qatari company to redevelop the Chelsea Barracks site in London. The scheme was dropped at the last minute and Candy sued the Qatari company in the High Court, where it was alleged that Charles had lobbied the royal family to get the scheme withdrawn.
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A letter Charles sent to the Qatari Prime Minister in March 2009 was revealed in court, showing the Prince complaining about ‘brutalist’ architecture in the city and pushing the merits of an alternative neo-classical scheme by his favourite architect, Quinlan Terry.
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Two months later, Charles met the Emir for tea at Clarence House and the court heard that
the ruler subsequently ‘went mental’ with the head of the Qatari company, echoing Charles’s view of ‘how awful the scheme was’.
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Not only did Candy win his case, but the judge condemned Charles’s intervention as ‘unexpected and unwelcome’. The Royal Institute of British Architects, whose members have suffered interference from Charles on many occasions, said that the case highlighted ‘inappropriate behind-the-scenes methods used by the Prince of Wales’ to stop the Chelsea Barracks scheme.
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Its architect, Lord Rogers, later claimed that the Prince effectively has a veto over planning applications in London, accusing him of ‘unconstitutional behaviour’ and an ‘abuse of power’.
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It is not just the Queen’s eldest son who enjoys connections with unsavoury regimes. His younger brother, the Duke of York, is such an avid traveller that he has earned the nickname ‘Air Miles Andy’. As well as the usual clutch of princes from Gulf states, he is on friendly
terms with politicians and oligarchs from Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, former Soviet republics with poor human rights records. During the Prince’s ten-year stint as a UK trade envoy, most of his trips were paid for by taxpayers, with the cost amounting to £358,763 in 2010 alone;
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he stepped down from the role in the middle of the following year, but his publicly funded travel bill rose by £20,000, including £81,000 for a single trip via a chartered flight to Saudi Arabia.
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(The Prince once chartered an aircraft for a two-day trip to Teesside and Belfast, at a cost of £10,470.) This is despite the fact that Andrew’s role as trade envoy was marred by a series of bad decisions, usually involving close relatives of despotic leaders; early in 2011, the Labour MP Chris Bryant called for the Prince to be sacked from his job promoting trade, claiming in Parliament that he was a ‘very close friend’ of Colonel Gaddafi’s second son, Saif al-Islam, who was later charged with two counts of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal
Court.
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Andrew also held a lunch at Buckingham Palace for Sakher el-Materi, son-in-law of the Tunisian dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, just three months before the regime was overthrown in the revolution that kicked off the Arab Spring in 2011;
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some people, it seems, just can’t help being on the wrong side of history.

But the connection that cast greatest doubt on Andrew’s judgement – and finally caused him to stand down as trade envoy – was his friendship with the American multi-millionaire and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The financier owned a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, and in 2005 a woman complained to police that he had assaulted her fourteen-year-old daughter at his home. The FBI began an investigation and up to forty young women, some of them aged between fourteen and sixteen at the time, claimed they had been procured for sex at the mansion. In 2008, Epstein entered a plea bargain, pleading guilty to soliciting prostitution with an
under-age girl; he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and served thirteen months. On Epstein’s release, Andrew continued to see him and he was even photographed walking with the financier – now a registered sex offender – in New York’s Central Park. Newspaper reports suggest that the Prince eventually broke the connection but the damage was done, landing the British royal family with the worst set of headlines it has endured in decades: ‘Andrew denies sex slave claims: Prince is named in US lawsuit’ (
Daily Express
) and ‘I was Andy’s sex slave: Palace’s fury at shock court claims in States’ (
The Sun
). The accusations emerged in early January 2015 after a woman filed a motion in a Florida court claiming that Epstein had ‘loaned’ her for sex with wealthy and well-connected friends, including Prince Andrew, when she was seventeen (and thus a minor under Florida law). Buckingham Palace initially refused to comment but later changed its mind and issued no fewer than four categorical denials of ‘any suggestion of impropriety with under-age minors’ on the Prince’s part.
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An elected head of state who behaved like the Queen’s two elder sons, using public funds on a profligate scale to visit regimes accused of flagrant human rights abuses, would risk being ejected by voters at the next election; someone who covertly used his or her connections to destroy a commercial deal might even end up being impeached. That is how the democratic process works, maintaining checks and balances so that no individual becomes too powerful. But the Windsors are immovable under present constitutional arrangements and their position at the top of the social structure plays a key role in maintaining the UK’s class system. This is another unappealing feature of ‘modern’ Britain which would look very different under a republic, reducing at a stroke the huge number of people directly employed by or dependent on the royal family for patronage of one sort or another; royalty institutionalises deference, the notion that some people deserve respect solely on account of who they are – their birthright, in other words – and hence
condescension
and
snobbery
are built into the system. There are few better places to see this in action than a Buckingham Palace garden party, when thousands of
people from all over the country are invited to drink tea on the palace lawn and mingle, at a safe distance, with the royals. There isn’t even a pretence of equality as the masses are guided towards a huge marquee, kept well away from the more favoured guests who make for the smaller and more exclusive diplomatic and royal tents. One July afternoon, when the event was wrecked by a sudden downpour of monsoon proportions, I heard an announcement that the royal family was being ‘evacuated’ into the palace, while the rest of us were left to huddle, as best we could, in the inadequate shelter of the big marquee. Few complained, because the key to this system is everyone knowing their place and being thankful for the tiny advantages – in this case, being in the palace garden at all – that come with it.

The popularity of TV dramas such as
Upstairs, Downstairs
and
Downton Abbey
is often attributed to nostalgia, suggesting that viewers enjoy watching a social hierarchy that now seems quaint and outmoded. But the army of volunteers who show visitors around National Trust properties confirms the persistence of an opposing and profoundly undemocratic narrative;
uncritically affirming the social status of previous owners, they send a message that birth and wealth matter as much as they ever did in the UK. This is a paradox in a country where millions of voters regularly turn out to support parties whose manifestos claim a commitment to equality and social justice – though not, as we have seen, an elected head of state – and so is the fact that the Queen enjoys immense powers of
nepotism
. She exercises these first and foremost to the benefit of her immediate relatives, showering them with titles in lieu of (or in addition to) the usual birthday and wedding gifts. In 1987, she decided that Princess Anne would in future be known as the Princess Royal, a title restricted to the monarch’s eldest daughter; in 2011, she celebrated her grandson William’s wedding by conferring the title of Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on him and his bride. (The couple even have a spare title, Earl and Countess of Strathearn, for use when they cross the border into Scotland.) Prince Andrew got a royal dukedom when he married Sarah Ferguson, although the Duchess of York has complained of being frozen out of the family since her divorce. The Dukedom of Windsor is vacant
and seems likely to remain so, given its unfortunate history, but the Queen has plenty of other baubles to dangle down the chain. Honours come in minute gradations, bewildering to foreigners but clearly understood by those who hope to receive them; a CBE is worth more than an OBE, for instance, and that in turn is better than an MBE. So significant are these distinctions that I once heard about a former British ambassador who was distraught to receive a common-or-garden knighthood when he had expected a KCMG; both entitle the holder to be addressed as ‘Sir’ but a ‘Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George’ (satirically known as ‘Kindly Call Me God’) is much posher.

I was more than a little surprised, in view of my republicanism, to receive a letter in 2003 offering me an MBE for ‘services to human rights’. I didn’t think about accepting it for a moment because the Order of the British Empire is so closely associated with the royal family; dished out by the Queen and Prince Charles at twice-yearly investitures, its motto is ‘For God and the Empire’. It is outrageous that a citizen of a 21st-century democracy can be honoured by the state only if he or she
buys into this edifice of royal flummery. I’m not against the state recognising outstanding achievement, but it could just as easily be done through a secular and egalitarian Order of Britain. The reaction to my refusal was revealing in itself, showing how widely the snobbery of the honours system has taken hold in unexpected quarters, including journalism: one friend told me I’d done the right thing because he thought I deserved ‘more’ than an MBE; another wrote an angry newspaper column, implying that if I didn’t want it, he wouldn’t mind having it in my place. There
is
an option of accepting an honour without receiving it in person, but it’s clearly frowned upon; a well-known writer who turned down a trip to Buckingham Palace told me he was later left off the list when the country’s foremost novelists were invited to a reception by the Queen.

Along with the monarchy, it’s time for the whole rigmarole of royal dukes, hereditary peers, earls and knights to be consigned to history. (It actually made no sense to expel unelected hereditary peers from the House of Lords, where they were able to pass legislation, while retaining the far greater privileges of the unelected royal
family.) That would allow the UK to become the egalitarian nation it already claims to be; for the growing numbers of people who are getting involved in Republic’s campaign for an elected head of state, the idea of the UK as a species of royal theme park is long past its sell-by date. Just about every recent political development is moving in the same direction, whether it is the demand for greater devolution in Scotland and England or legal powers for constituents to recall MPs. Indeed, it is ironic that most of the accusations hurled at MPs, reasonably or otherwise, since the expenses scandal of 2009 apply with even greater force to the royal family: distance from ordinary people, lack of accountability, absence of transparency, profligacy with public money. But while MPs who behave badly are subject to parliamentary scrutiny and can be ejected from office at the next election, nothing in our political system can protect us from the accession of a monarch who has already shown himself unfit to represent the country.

Anxiety about the heir apparent emerges in unexpected places, as this headline from the
Daily Mail
reveals: ‘Why Prince Charles is too dangerous to be king:
in a landmark essay Max Hastings tells why this increasingly eccentric royal could imperil the monarchy’.
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Even without anything approaching a genuine debate, it is clear that a substantial number of people – around a quarter of the population – do not want Prince Charles to succeed his mother. According to a YouGov media briefing in the wake of the diamond jubilee, ‘Our polls are consistent in showing a significant minority of people who think Charles will not do well in the role of King.’
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Although Charles has since recovered some ground, a poll at this time showed that 44 per cent would prefer the throne to pass directly to William. Clearly, despite this country having been a monarchy for centuries, a significant number of people do not understand the principle of primogeniture; in a constitutional monarchy, it is of no consequence if the heir to the throne is a dud. Charles III, or whatever he decides to call himself when he ascends the throne, will be the next head of state whether we like it or not. Nor does he intend to
change his ways: ‘friends’ of the Prince told
The Guardian
that he will go on making ‘heartfelt interventions’ on subjects he feels passionately about when he becomes King.
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It is a curious fact that people seem less concerned about this eventuality than they are about the bogeyman of ‘President Blair’, a prospect from which we are protected by the most significant feature of any democratic system. Anyone who wanted to become our elected President would have to win the popular vote, and it is hard to imagine a politician more widely disliked or distrusted than the former Prime Minister.