The Japanese may fight against the fury of the earth and the sea and inescapable radioactivity, the Libyans may try to escape the slaughter whereas nobody cares, the Egyptians and the Tunisians may attempt to run away from their police, and never mind the fact that Mugabe and Gbagbo violently and indecently cling to a power they no longer have in Zimbabwe and Ivory Coast, that the European Union is a figment of the imagination and that French democracy keeps on being confiscated and wrongfully misled! As for the royals it is business as usual.
Because those people, ladies and gentlemen, they make money and they show off, but should they? Well, that’s another pair of shoes. Then in the Windsor family you can have the mother, who not long ago begged the state poverty fund to heat Buckingham, that small palace of hers. You can also get the eldest son, Charles. That guy is very keen on giving advice that nobody would ever care to ask from him. He is desperately waiting for that ludicrous throne he may never get anyway and which might prove useless. You can have the youngest grandson too, Harry. Some mischievous kid that Harry! He would dress as a nazi just to entertain his friends, after a few drinks, between gentlemen of course. But it’s not all!
There is Andrew too, Charles’s younger brother, who bided his time in the Royal Navy to become a hero by recapturing the remote Falkland islands in 1982, such an essential battle to enable Margaret Thatcher to be re-elected the year after, whereas she was plummeting in the polls. Since then he had been in need of a real job, because going back to nature was a trade his elder brother already took. So the already mentioned prince, Andrew, Duke of York, became a trade ambassador for the UK. On top of the annual £236,000 generously and unwillingly granted by taxpayers through the Civil List, the prince was given £439,000 last year to cover his expenses for that part-time occupation.
All those figures which were reported by the website issue of the Guardian on March 7th 2011, can make readers sick. It is a real shame and the basis of a legitimate revolution, but the Duke of York did not stop there. By the means of this position, he cultivated relationships that the whole British press politely hailed as dubious, since he kept close links, smeared by strong supsicions of sleaze. That was firstly the case with a deal arms in Kyrgyzstan. Then that same prince Andrew was highly suspected with receiving a big amount of money from Timur Kalibayev, Kazazhstan billionaire president’s son-in-law, which was used to maintain his Surrey mansion house. In 2010, on the occasion of Kalibayev’s birthday, prince Andrew himself arranged Elton John to come for a private show, a favour for which he was lavishly paid. The prince’s name appeared in a number of fishy cases in Saudi Arabia and in Lybia, namely with Saif Gaddafi.
But prince Andrew’s latest mischief filled everybody in the kingdom, whatever political side they belong, with dismay. He indeed built friendly ties with American billionaire, Jeffrey Epstein, and, on several occasions, stayed in his Florida charming estate. Nothing to say so far, but the problem is that Epstein already served a prison sentence for soliciting underage girls for prostitution. And those girls stayed in Florida at the same time as prince Andrew. Nice people, aren’t they? But the question is: is the evil new? As a matter of fact the excellent and lately released film, The King’s speech, emphasized the British sovereign’s dreadful stammering, but what the film director did not insist upon is the fact that it was thanks to Winston Chruchill’s reluctance – he was simply a minister at the time in 1936 – that a stammerer was boosted up to the throne to avoid leaving it to pro-nazi Edward VIII. What do you think happened to prince Andrew? David Cameron came up with a statement that makes him gradually sound as a true MontyPython : I have full confidence in him (prince Andrew) and in the full contribution he has made to UK trade.
Potograph:Facundo Arrizabalag / EPA.