UK monarchy, govt plunge into crises
>>When Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain was hospitalised with Covid in April 2020, the alarming news bulletin came soon after a televised address by Queen Elizabeth II in which she reassured the British public that after the pandemic ebbed, “We will meet again”.
Stoic, dignified and comforting, the queen’s words helped anchor the country during the fretful days that followed — not the first time the monarchy has acted as a stabilising force for the government during tumultuous events.
Last week, however, both of these grand British institutions pitched simultaneously into crisis.
On Wednesday, Mr Johnson admitted attending a garden party not long after he had recovered from the virus, which violated lockdown rules and set off a chorus of calls for him to resign. Hours later, a federal judge in Manhattan rejected a bid by the queen’s second son, Prince Andrew, to throw out a sex abuse lawsuit against him.
On Thursday, Buckingham Palace announced that it would force Andrew to relinquish all his military titles and the honorific, “His Royal Highness.” He “is defending this case as a private citizen,” the palace said in a terse statement that underscored the finality of the prince’s exile from royal life.
While these cases are about starkly different issues, they both feature privileged middle-aged men under fire for their behaviour, raising age-old questions of class, entitlement and double standards.
“Boris Johnson and Prince Andrew,” Alastair Campbell, a former communications director for prime minister Tony Blair, said in a Twitter post. “What an image the world is getting of Global Britain.”
Mr Campbell was involved in a now-celebrated episode in which a more stable government helped a monarchy in crisis: In 1997, he and Mr Blair, a popular Labour leader coming off a landslide election victory, persuaded the queen to strike a more empathetic tone in reacting to the death of Princess Diana in a car crash. That defused a growing tide of resentment against the monarch.
“Normally,” Mr Campbell said, “they avoid crises at the same time.”
Commentators said, half in jest, that the legal ruling against Andrew, 61, helped Mr Johnson, 57, because it deflected attention from his grilling in the House of Commons, where opposition lawmakers accused him of lying and demanded that he resign. But both men are at the mercy of forces largely out of their control.
Mr Johnson has asked lawmakers to defer judgment on him, pending the results of an internal investigation into Downing Street’s parties by a senior civil servant, Sue Gray. If she determines that Mr Johnson misled Parliament in his previous statements, it will almost certainly cost him his job.
Andrew, by failing to win the dismissal of a suit brought by Virginia Giuffre, faces the prospect of damning disclosures in depositions of him and Ms Giuffre, who claimed he raped her when she was a teenager.
She says she was trafficked to Andrew by his friend, convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew flatly denies the charge and has said he has no recollection of meeting Ms Giuffre.
What the two cases have in common, critics said, is a lack of accountability on the part of the main actors. Mr Johnson, in apologising for the party, acknowledged the anger that the public would feel “when they think in Downing Street itself the rules are not being properly followed by the people who make the rules.”
But he insisted that he viewed the gathering as a “work event” — one that he attended for only 25 minutes — an alibi that placed the blame on his subordinates who organised the gathering.
On Friday, capping a week of abject contrition, Mr Johnson apologised to Buckingham Palace for raucous parties held in Downing Street the night before the queen buried her husband, Prince Philip, last year in a socially distanced ceremony that left her grieving alone in a choir stall.
Mr Johnson is not accused of attending these bashes, unlike the “work event” for which he apologised in Parliament.
Andrew has not commented on his legal setback. But he and his lawyers have manoeuvred to avoid confronting Ms Giuffre’s accusations at a trial. He scrambled to avoid being served with legal papers in Britain. His lawyers tried to get the case dismissed on jurisdictional grounds and, most recently, on the basis of a settlement agreement between Ms Giuffre and Epstein.
With so much at stake, especially in a year in which the queen is celebrating 70 years on the throne, royal watchers speculate that Andrew will seek his own settlement with Ms Giuffre. Who would pay that settlement and with what money are already questions being asked by British newspapers.
Buckingham Palace’s announcement that it would remove Andrew’s military titles and deny him “His Royal Highness” suggests he has no path to rehabilitate himself.
It is the kind of ruthless action that Conservative Party lawmakers have yet to take against Mr Johnson, despite their frustration with him.
Unlike in April 2020, when the queen sent an ailing Mr Johnson her best wishes, she is almost certain to remain silent about his current plight. ©2022 THE