JENNIE BOND ON ROYAL RIFT:
EX-TD says public will dislike paying for Mcentee’s stand-in
EXCLUSIVE
Family bust-ups are never pretty. The best you can hope for is that the punches are at least thrown in private. But, when they are played out on a world stage like this one, they become as ugly a spectacle as a cage fight.
So, with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in one corner and the House of Windsor in the other, is the whole edifice of monarchy under threat?
The answer is no. Harry is now sixth in line to the throne. The chances of him becoming king are negligible. And, in any case, he and Meghan have made themselves largely irrelevant to the future of the monarchy.
They have stepped back from royal duties, become a commercial brand, and sold their story to a different queen: the doyenne of chat shows, Oprah Winfrey.
The consequences are painful for the family, liberating for Meghan, but constitutionally unimportant.
There is no comparison with the abdication crisis in 1936, when Edward VIII abandoned his throne for the love of another American divorcee, Wallis Simpson. The result was, overnight, there was a new king, George VI.
It doesn’t compare with the War of the Wales’s in the 1990s, when Charles and Diana were involved in a prolonged, vitriolic public fight as their marriage disintegrated.
The debate back then was whether the Crown would have to skip a generation because a divorced king would not be acceptable. And could a man who had admitted adultery, then divorced and who would possibly remarry, be a suitable candidate for his role as supreme governor of the Church of England?
But this crisis is clearly damaging to the Royal Family: deepening the rift, hurting more feelings and bruising more egos.
Meghan is a woman who seems to divide opinion. I have to admit I have been surprised by many people in my own generation, the older generation, who have viewed her with suspicion since she came on the scene. They predicted that it would all end in tears.
For myself, I thought she was a brilliant addition to a modern monarchy. A mature, independent, confident and spirited woman of dual heritage struck me as a valuable asset for the Royal Family.
The younger generation have tended to side with the Sussexes. Harry has always been popular: less formal, a bit mischievous and with his mother’s sensitivity and compassion. In fact, both William and Harry have played a large part in recent years in making the monarchy cool and relevant to young people. And that is vitally important if it is to survive.
Younger people tend to question why Meghan should have been required to conform to age-old traditions.
Why did she have to fit into this most rigid mould and give up much of her independence? Why is the fabric of Palace machinery so stuck in the past?
And I think they have a point.
When Meghan was a young girl, she was perplexed by a questionnaire which asked her to tick a box about her ethnicity. Her father is white and her mother is black. Which box was she to tick? Her father had tried to help
I hope Charles is still talking to Harry and Meghan, and offering them fatherly advice JENNIE BOND ON FALLOUT FROM A PERSONAL FAMILY TRAGEDY
matters by giving her a Barbie doll family for Christmas. He bought two sets, took them apart and remixed them to create a black mother, a white father and a child of each colour.
And when Meghan told him about her dilemma over the questionnaire, he simply told her to “make your own box”.
Those words have stayed with her and when she found she did not fit into the Palace mould, she set about forging a new role and path for herself and her husband. If we try stepping into her shoes, it is obvious why life in the royal fold would be difficult.
For a woman of colour, whose ancestors were once slaves, it must be hard to accept that you are now unequal.
When you arrive at an official event with the family, you must take your place behind others.
Because your husband was the spare, never the heir, you must walk submissively behind your brother-inlaw and his wife.
You must curtsy to people in order of precedence, and your diary must be arranged around theirs if they are higher up the pecking order. Personally, I think these old-fashioned rules need a bit of shaking up.
I quite accept it is appropriate for the Queen to arrive first at official functions but why can’t the rest of the family just rock up together?
When we saw William and Catherine and Harry and Meghan walking alongside one another at Sandringham a couple of Christmases ago, no one fainted, and no one was sent to the Tower.
I have never curtseyed to any member of the Royal Family – and I’ve survived to tell the tale.
Maybe they all need to loosen up a bit.
All of this is a personal tragedy for Prince Charles. He has witnessed his sons suffer the trauma of losing their mother and seen their once strong and supportive brotherly relationship fall apart. It is tough for any parent to watch children feud. To see it happen in public must be gut-wrenching.
Charles should understand the pressure Meghan felt under. He was once rejected by a spirited girlfriend who refused his proposal of marriage. Amanda Knatchbull, Earl Mountbatten’s granddaughter and now Lady Ellingworth, later explained her decision.
She said that marrying into the Royal Family would involve “a loss of independence unlike in any other marriage and an absolute surrender of self to a system”. The Prince commented that her answer had only served to confirm his own belief that to marry into the House of Windsor was a sacrifice that no one should be expected to make.
I hope Charles is still talking to Harry and Meghan and offering them fatherly advice. As with many family quarrels, the passage of time – in this case possibly years – may soothe the hurt feelings and heal the rift.
But for now, the Royal Family – and I suspect most of us – believe that with all the suffering and damage caused by the pandemic, we have more to worry about than two very wealthy and privileged individuals complaining about their lot in life.
6
THE public would not be “thankful” if a new justice minister were to be appointed to replace the incumbent when she has her baby, it was claimed yesterday.
Nora Owen said Helen Mcentee will face criticism despite being entitled to take time to take care of her child.
She added her absence would be “giving somebody a lot of headaches”.
Mrs Owen, a former Fine Gael Justice Minister, also said it was “extraordinary” it appeared a constitutional amendment is needed to ensure politicians are permitted to take maternity leave.
Ms Mcentee will become the first serving minister to give birth. The baby is due in May and Ms Mcentee intends on taking six months’ leave.
At present, public office holders have to claim sick leave when they take time off to have and look after children.
Mrs Owen said: “It raises the whole issue of what happens when somebody like Helen [Mcentee] goes and says she’s going to take her full six months.
“She will have to be paid because she’s entitled to be paid. But do you put another person in and is there another full ministerial salary paid out?
“Do you raise the profile of a junior minister and put them into a senior ministry? Do they get the extra money because they are on less pay? Do you appoint a temporary junior minister?
“I don’t think the public would be thankful, I think, for kind of a full new minister to be appointed on the full salary when people are struggling.
“I’d imagine that is an area that is giving somebody, somewhere, a lot of headaches. Someone will say, ‘Oh, she’s getting her salary, she should be in there’. She will get her salary the same as anybody else on leave when they’re out.”
Mrs Owen revealed she suffered sexism during her two-decade-long career in the Dail and described the online abuse of female politicians as “disgraceful”.
She added: “Very often, depending on what ministry you have, as a woman there can be targeting.
“I remember one journalist wrote an article saying, ‘We wouldn’t be going through this now if Michael Noonan had been Justice Minister as opposed to Nora Owen’. A man in other words.
“When someone used to raise it with me I used to joke and say, ‘Oh yeah, the criminals are all sitting around saying come on, lads, let’s do the crime now because there’s a woman in there and we won’t get caught’.
“It was such a stupid thing to say and, to be honest, very misogynistic.”
Mrs Owen features in Proud To Serve: The Voices Of The Women Of Cumann na ngaedheal And Fine Gael 1922-1992.
Fine Gael is marking International Women’s Day by launching a reprint of the book by Maria Hegarty and Martina Murray.
When first elected to the Dail in 1981, Mrs Owen had three small children and was one of only a handful of female TDS.
In the book she recounts how after winning her first seat in 1981 a journalist was overheard calling his newspaper: “An anonymous suburban housewife has had a surprise victory in Dublin North.”
She said she had to deal with men referring to her as a housewife, using it as a “way to put people down”.