Subject to approval

Prince Philip’s tears at Buckingham Palace last Friday on the 10th anniversary of the death of the Princess of Wales wouldn’t have been for Diana.
Philip couldn’t stand the woman, even though he continues to deny claims from Di’s friends that he wrote letters calling her a “harlot” and a “trollop” or that he was in any way involved in her death.
When the YouGov poll in the Daily Telegraph about what the public thinks of the royal family on the anniversary of Di’s death landed on the breakfast table, there probably wasn’t a dry eye in Buck House.
Respect for the royal family among yer average Brits has plummeted to below 50 per cent for the first time in ten years. Commentators described it as “plummeting” to 48 per cent.
And the tears? They would have been from Prince Philip laughing his tweed breeches off because, even if a democratic majority disrespects the royal family (and they clearly do now), there’s not a damn thing their ‘subjects’ can do about it.
Suck it up, subjects.

Prince Love Rat

Diana’s husband, Prince Charles (colonel in chief of the Parachute Regiment, lest we forget) was having a torrid affair with Camilla Parker Bowles while still married to the woman who was to go down in history as ‘The English Rose’ (Elton John) and ‘The People’s Princess’ (Tony Blair/Alastair Campbell).
That’s why Camilla bowed out of last Friday’s memorial service at the Guards’ Chapel at Wellington Barracks, near Buckingham Palace.
But why no headlines about the dilemma facing ‘Love Rat Prince Charles’?
The man who would be king (no Catholics need apply) and ‘Defender of the Faith’ was wildly unfaithful to his lawful wedded wife, a princess of the realm he swears fealty to. While Diana was home raising his little princes (and having the odd affair herself), Charles was having his crown jewels polished by his illicit, also married, long-time lover, Camilla.
Diana unfaithful but deified; Camilla unfaithful and vilified; Prince Charles unfaithful and diplomatically ignored.
That must be what they call ‘The Divine Right of Kings’.

The Papers’ Princess

How was Diana transformed overnight from media-manipulating mental patient to ‘The People’s Princess’ when she died in a car crash caused by her drunk driver and her not wearing her seat belt?
Fleet Street paper has never refused ink

The FAI’s Princess

The hysteria surrounding the death of Diana even swept through the suits running the Football Association of Ireland, Sunday Tribune sports writer Dave Hannigan recalled this week under the headline, “FAI’s mishap still baffles a decade on from Diana.”
On the day of Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997, the Irish international soccer side were in Reykjavik to play a World Cup qualifier against Iceland.
“Before kick-off,” Dave Hannigan remembers, “as requested by the FAI, a minute’s silence was requested for the dead English aristocrat, and with black armbands prominent on every green jersey, they went to work.”
Read that bit again: “as requested by the FAI...”
Manager Mick McCarthy defended the Irish national team’s tribute to a foreign royal on the basis that many of the players earned their living in the English league. But, as Hannigan points out, four members of the Icelandic side were also earning their wages in England and they didn’t wear black armbands.
“What was the difference between them and their Irish counterparts?
“Was Roy Keane more moved by Diana’s work on landmines than Bolton’s Gudni Bergsson? Did Shay Given feel particularly obliged to commemorate her AIDS campaigning in a manner that didn’t occur to Crystal Palace’s Herman Hreidarsson?”
There were no black armbands for Jack Lynch, who died a couple of weeks before a play-off against Turkey in 1999. Did the FAI rate a foreign princess who had never even been to Ireland higher than a former Taoiseach? Evidently so.
One of the few protests about the FAI’s odd behaviour uncovered by Dave Hannigan was a letter in The Irish Times a couple of days after the game.
Tim O’Halloran in Dublin wrote to the Times:
“In June 1994, six men were murdered in Loughinisland, County Down, while watching the Republic of Ireland soccer team play a World Cup match against Italy.
“The Football Association of Ireland decided not to mark the event at the team’s next match. This same organisation has now chosen to mark the death of a foreign aristocrat with a display of black armbands...
“The men murdered by the UVF were real people supporting their team. They were deserving of a show of respect and, because of the circumstances and reason for their deaths, it should have been on a football field and by their team.”
Dave Hannigan concludes:
“Difficult to argue with that.”

You can’t keep your hat on

As if Britain’s Prince Philip hasn’t had enough trouble with blondes. Just as he goes through the motions at the 10th anniversary memorial service for Princess Diana, up pops another dizzy blonde to give him more grief.
Being a massive fan of Ricky Gervais’s classic TV comedy, The Office, my heart was lifted by the sight of Lucy Davis launching a full frontal assault on the British Army.
Lucy has got her kit off in protest at the use of fur from Canadian black bears to make the headgear for the elite Guards regiments, including the Irish Guards.
Anti-cruelty group PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has unveiled Lucy “clutching a cute teddy bear to her body – and nothing else” in what it calls “a sexy new PETA ad” against the bearskins of the queen’s guards at Buckingham Palace.
Other celebrities who have backed the online petition to get the British Army to use fake fur instead of animal skins include Pamela Anderson, Sadie Frost, Mary McCartney, Twiggy, Julian Clary, Jilly Cooper, Amanda Holden and Roger Moore.
PETA says that it can take the entire hide of one bear to make just one guard’s headpiece. Many of the bears are shot several times before they die. Some might be wounded and escape the hunters but then they bleed to death. When mother bears are killed, orphaned cubs are left behind to starve.
Lucy Davis says:
“Not only was I horrified to find that it was one bear to make one hat, but that it’s not really about just one bear – in a way, it can be one whole family. That whole family dies – just for a hat.”
Prince Phillip has nothing to say, for a change.