BANISH THEM!
After Andrew and Fergie embarrass the Queen by throwing a party at the Palace for the Beckhams, a royal historian says there’s only one fitting punishment . . .
OH, TO have been a fly on the wall at the Buckingham Palace breakfast table yesterday when the Queen and Prince Philip confronted the headlines about the hideously inappropriate use of their London residence for a party for multi-millionaire ex-footballer David Beckham’s six-year-old daughter Harper.
The Queen, even at 91, remains a woman who’s always been sensitively attuned to the PR requirements of constitutional monarchy. At a time when she is due to receive £370 million of public money for refurbishment of a building that is funded by the British taxpayer, she must have winced.
This party for the privileged child of a man with an estimated fortune of £280 million was arranged and organised by her second son, Prince Andrew, whose much- criticised role as Britain’s special representative for trade and investment earned him the nickname ‘Air Miles Andy’.
And I suspect Prince Philip — never at a loss for a barbed and trenchant reaction — will have done a great deal more than wince at the further revelation that the fiasco appears to have been the inspiration of his former daughter-in-law Sarah Ferguson, who was at the party with her exhusband and their 27-year-old younger daughter, Princess Eugenie.
Inappropriate
This episode once again highlights the uncomfortable position of the Duchess of York, who was divorced by Andrew in 1996 and who has not been a member of the Royal Family in an official sense for more than 20 years.
Yet despite this — and the fact that she was filmed in 2010 grubbily offering access to him in return for payment of £500,000 — she continues to share her former husband’s royal residences.
In the wake of that scandal, she was not invited to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011, but still she continues to loom large on the royal scene. Only last month I watched her, ‘representing His Royal Highness The Duke of York’, making a quasi-regal entrance into Westminster Abbey to be received by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster at the celebrity-packed service of thanksgiving for the life and work of Ronnie Corbett CBE.
To all intents and purposes, Fergie was being treated with the deference due to a member of the Royal Family.
Her involvement in the Beckham party has drawn particular criticism from the Queen’s former press spokesman, Dickie Arbiter, who described the affair as ‘tawdry’.
He said of the event: ‘What a nonsense. What are they doing there? What is Eugenie having a party there for? What is Sarah York doing, having organised it — allegedly? None of them has got a right to be there. Is it being opened up as a theme park? It devalues what the place is all about.’
Perhaps the worst aspect of this ill-judged jamboree is the insensitivity of the timing.
This year, people have lost their lives in terrorist atrocities, and, in the case of the Grenfell Tower fire, not only lives but homes and all their possessions. Yet here is Buck- ingham Palace being flagrantly misused as a playground for the rich and the famous.
Not surprisingly, people have taken to social media to vent their anger at the lack of compassion this conveys.
‘Harper Beckham at Buckingham Palace? Pass the sickbag,’ wrote one man. ‘ What about Grenfell victims who have nothing?’
A woman added bitterly: ‘Don’t think they’d allow me to do that, so why should she be allowed?’
Vainglorious
Dickie Arbiter reserves his fiercest criticism for a photograph of Harper Beckham placed by her parents on the social media site Instagram.
She is dressed in a long blue Cinderella- style dress in the centre of the Buckingham Palace quadrangle, holding a red balloon bearing a message from her mother Victoria, with the words, ‘Our little birthday princess. X. Kisses’. Arbiter, usually a model of restraint where the Royal Family is concerned, asks: ‘Why can’t Joe Public, when they go in on the Buckingham Palace tour, have their pictures taken in the quadrangle? Why do the Beckhams get special treatment?’
It’s a question many will ask, especially in the current climate of tragedy and hardship. Of course, the regal aspirations of Posh and Becks are well known. Not for nothing was their former 24- acre, grade II-listed Hertfordshire mansion dubbed by the media ‘Beckingham Palace’.
David Beckham was at the real Palace to receive an OBE in 2003, but he seems to consider this an inadequate recognition of his career.
In 2013, the prospect of a knighthood was scotched by the Honours Committee that adjudicates on gongs, after suggestions (which he denied) that he had been involved in tax avoidance schemes.
His image was badly damaged by leaked emails in which he was alleged to have referred to the committee as ‘a bunch of c***s’ and — because he believed his charity work should have been a passport to a knighthood — as ‘those old unappreciative c***s’.
A further email rant by Beckham — also leaked — contained a vicious attack on the new Forces sweetheart, Katherine Jenkins OBE.
Beckham is alleged to have asked: ‘ Katherine Jenkins OBE for what? Singing at the rugby and going to see the troops plus taking coke. F***ing joke’.
Jenkins admitted the allegation of drug-taking and her management pointed out it had taken place more than a decade before she received her OBE. Yet the incident showed Beckham in his true, appalling colours.
And although no knighthood for him has been forthcoming, his wife was at Buckingham Palace this year to receive the OBE for ‘services to fashion’.
This mystified observers of our honours system to whom the alleged ‘ services’ may seem obscure. Dismayed by criticism of the party yesterday, a Buckingham Palace spokesman was forced into a defence strategy. ‘From time
ALL the technocratic remoteness of our political elite was on display when Theresa May helped launch a Government review of ‘ modern working practices’ (ie casual work).
One reason she flopped in last month’s general election was that the public thought her an Establishment trundler. That perception will not have been altered yesterday.
The review, riddled with jargon, was led by sometime Blair policy adviser Matthew Taylor. The cadaverous Taylor, in crumpled linen suit and a look of spongy concern, is chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts. The mid-morning event was held at its central London HQ, in a grand hall with a neoclassical 18th century mural.
The Royal Society of Arts is not, alas, a sodality of bow-tied, faintly red-nosed aesthetes. Calling itself ‘an enlightenment organisation’ (what pompous asses!), it is basically a springboard for policy careerists. The place was swarming with slim young researchers. How many of them got their jobs through favouritism?
Mr Taylor gave an introductory speech in which he explained ‘good employers have nothing to fear’, a formulation often used by authoritarians. He waffled about the ‘employment wedge’, ‘productivity challenge’, ‘voluntary flexibility’ and ‘platform-based models’. His report mentions ‘aligning frameworks’, ‘online tools’, ‘understanding tradeoffs’ and ‘Gatsby Benchmarks’. One of the four authors, Greg Marsh, had placed his signature to the foreword and it was no more than a noseshaped squiggle. The self-importance of the illegible autograph!
‘We should offer Good Work to all our citizens,’ cried Mr Taylor. Workers should no longer be called workers, even. They should, he averred, be known as ‘dependent contractors’. Oh for Heaven’s sake.
After foggy Mr Taylor (who spent his early morning on numerous radio and TV shows, naturally), we heard from Mrs May. Sunbeam that she is, she observed that between childhood and retirement, most of us will spend half our waking hours at work. Gulp. Thanks for that, Theresa.
‘Good work,’ she added, ‘can promote mental and physical health and emotional well-being.’ This is certainly not true at Westminster, where politics drives many people nuts and into early, quite often liquid graves.
It was a year since she had become PM. Despite her disappointment at the election result, she intended to press on with her vision of making
Britain a country in which ‘injustices and vested interests’ were tackled. The main area for this was part-time work. She was ‘determined’ to give the Taylor review proper consideration but, er, because she now lacked a parliamentary majority, she needed other parties to help her ‘take the bold action required’. FROM
all sides – the main speakers, audience members and two long-winded broadcast journalists who were allowed to ask questions – we had just platitudes and Centrist spiel.
No one asked ‘what does this mean for college kids doing bar shifts?’. No one cut through the pap, saying ‘give us one practical example of how this will help those poor souls who work for Sports Direct’. Instead we had self-indulgent waffle about ‘skills’ and ‘flexibilities’ – words to disengage any normal mortal – as these grandees of the body politic paraded their concern. It was just so much cotton wool.
If Mrs May can persuade exploited toilers she is their ally, yet not make life impossibly bureaucratic for small firms, she may be on to something. But she will not do that by appearing alongside cliched droners in front of a staid audience of wonks at a central London venue under a mural of pastoral cherubs. She should haul herself to a Midlands warehouse, lose the high heels and the schoolmarmery, and speak in plain English.
The one benefit to her of yesterday’s hot air was that it gave the chinstrokers of Westminster something to talk about for a day. The rolling-news stations were full of it. The Guardian and BBC will have material for endless analysis pieces. Cue a hundred committees and debates and symposia. But will it shift a single vote?