Doughnut Brained Snobs Down to the Last Reporter

A Fleet Street publisher once offered me a job, which, not fitting into the scheme of things, I did not take but the idea of which was always tinged with gold.

My good friend would be twirling in his grave if he knew the sorry state in which much British journalism finds itself these days. Case in point:

The eldest grandson of Queen Elizabeth married a Canadian woman named Autumn Kelly, from Pointe Claire, Quebec, on Saturday, May 17.

The British press is always slobbering over the Royals. If you find the body of a British reporter lying in the road, wave a picture of a Royal - any Royal, alive or not - under his nose and if he doesn't stir you know he's dead.

The British press made Diana's life a misery - although that unfortunate woman had more demons than a typical Hollywood movie.

The British press has had a love-hate relationship with the Royal Family ever since they had a direct hand in destroying Princes Margaret's romance with Group Capt. Peter Townsend, though they will never admit it - except for the odd anti-royalist who takes pride in such a feat. To refresh: at the coronation of Elizabeth II, Margaret was seen picking a piece of lint off the Grp-Capt.'s suit. For the emotionally ossified Brits that was tantamount to Monica Lewinsky doing the dirty with President Clinton in public and the emotionally retarded but politically astute Court made Margaret hive off her lover, who then married a Belgian woman who looked exactly like his lost princess.

And now they are at it again. One supposes the British public must be deeply grateful to them for sniffing out the bride's terribly common family(British media scorn Canadian's royal wedding -http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=a7f58273-3b4f-46df-96c2-a54ef1e76862). The Kelly family includes >gasp!< a bricklayer who is the bride's twin brother and an uncle who ran a strip bar. It was later converted to a gay bar but the report is unclear as to whether the uncle was responsible. In any case, the Kelly family were depicted as a clan of yahoos who would raise many an aristocratic eyebrow in "a recent brutal Mail on Sunday profile," the article says.

For those of you who don't know that newspaper, this is the sort of article the Mail on Sunday carries:

"Yes, I let her have sex at 14 - but I never thought she'd run off with a 46-year-old grandfather
In her first full interview, the dental nurse mother of missing schoolgirl Lisa Wright says she didn't stop her daughter sleeping with her boyfriends but claims she could never have guessed the consequences".

Another newspaper, unnamed, described her as "an insincere, unsophisticated gold-digger from a 'suburban backwater' "- after, one presumes, having spent considerable time in her company in order to make such an assessment. The 'gold-digger' bit had me in stitches. Mr Phillips works for a living although he has a nice slice of his granny's estate. Mrs Phillips also works. Both made a tidy sum (over $1,000,000) by selling the exclusive access to their wedding to Hello! magazine, a mawkish, drooling, celebrity-addled publication, though one could equally make the point that they wanted to have some sort of public record of their wedding, given that the British press expressed such distaste. (Hello! is owned by Spanish publisher Eduardo Sanchez Junco.)

But over and above that, what has me laughing loudest about the gold-digging and unsophisticatedness of the bride is the odd fact or two from British monarchical history. Richard II was a monster. Anne was a lesbian. Nobody knows what Elizabeth I was other than that a virgin she wasn't. Prinny - the Prince of Wales who became George IV, who married a Catholic and had a family with her - was a pompous, self-absorbed, if jolly, oaf whose profligate ways and gluttony gave him a waistline of 50 inches by the age of 62 and a debt of £630,000 in 1795, equivalent to $31,000,000 today (but worth much, much more because of the cheapness of labour). Unwilling to pay it off, Parliament put him on an allowance. The debt up to 1795 was cleared by 1806 but his debts over the eleven years from 1795 remained.

In 1760, Prinny's father, George III, agreed to surrender the hereditary revenues of the Crown in exchange for a Civil List, to be funded by taxation. It paid for the mail as well as several other expenses; when William IV acceded in 1630, Parliament readjusted the Civil List, leaving the Royal Family as its only charge. The Civil List was supposed to cover the annual expenses of the clan, not be taken as a payment from which savings might be put aside, but that is precisely what Albert did after he married Victoria:

put a little bit here, a few coins there, the odd gold sovereign into the sock, a little pile under the mattress and eventually a nice big fat portfolio stuffed with so many blue chip stocks and high grade investments - including a foundation garment factory - that the Royal Family found itself well-cushioned against any sudden financial shocks - such as the one when the British public finally found a little smear of guts in its arsenal and the Civil List was trimmed down to cover only the nuclear monarchy around the Queen. And that was around the annuus horribilis of 1991. Windsor Castle burned. Pftt! also went the Royal Yacht Britannia and the Royal Flight and the Royal Train. Since then, it seems, the royals have been on a financial diet, though the Queen is able to pocket about $1,000,000 annually from paying staff because she now files an income tax return. But Mr Phillips has never seen a cent of the public's money because his mother, Princess Anne, astutely decided her children were to have no title and to take part in no mind-numbing ceremonies. It's been "turn each penny over twice before you spend it" and "get what you can and keep what you have". So it's hard to see where on that stony little plot Mrs Phillips would do much digging.

As Yogi Berra said: A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.

c2008 bluemlein.blogspot.com