UK News
Insights from the UK and beyond
from John Lloyd:
A yacht not fit for a queen
Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith … is in want of a yacht.
She had one, the Royal Yacht Britannia, which she loved very much. When the Labour government of Tony Blair said it was too expensive and decommissioned it soon after assuming office in 1997, she was seen to weep at the ceremony. Last year, Blair was reported as saying he regretted the decision, pressed upon him by the then-chancellor, Gordon Brown, and inherited from the previous, Conservative administration. It cost £11 million a year to run, and a necessary refit would have cost some £50 million. So it was put out to the nautical equivalent of pasture. It’s now on show at a dock in Leith, the port of Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh, where it’s in much demand as a venue for “occasions."
If in want of a yacht, Queen Elizabeth has never lacked for gallant courtiers. Michael Gove, the secretary of state for education, earlier this month wrote to the prime minister suggesting that for her Diamond Jubilee, to be celebrated in June this year, she should be promised (the event is too near for her to be “given”) a replacement yacht, to express the love her subjects bear her. After a little to-ing and fro-ing, Gove clarified that he had not meant that the expense – which might be some £80 million to £100 million – should be borne from the public purse, but rather would be raised from her (presumably better-heeled) admirers. The prime minister said he was all for it, on that basis. The deputy prime minister, Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, made a not-too-bad joke, saying the world was divided into the “yachts and the have-yachts."
This is a storm in a royal teacup, to be sure: The money may not be raised, the yacht never built. Already, a grand river pageant is planned for June 3, when the Diamond Jubilee will be celebrated with a four-day weekend holiday for all. The star of that show will be a luxury river boat, the Spirit of Chartwell, transformed by the film set designer Joseph Bennett into a gilded, garlanded royal barge. Bennett did the sets for the grandiose TV series Rome, so he may have had in mind the lines heralding Cleopatra’s watery arrival to meet her lover, the Roman general Antony, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: “The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burn'd on the water."
from Royal Wedding Diary:
Press faces royal wedding day dilemmas
Media companies, particularly from Britain and North America, are pouring a lot of resources into covering the April 29 wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton in London. The amount of money they are spending, and the temptation to decide what their millions of viewers want to see, could cloud editorial judgment on the day should things not go according to plan.
One potential problem could be if a small number of protesters turn violent, and attempt to "hijack" an event which the British government believes will be watched in some shape or form by more than a quarter of the Earth's population. This happened only recently in London when a march by up to half a million people protesting at spending cuts by the government was overshadowed by the violent actions of a few hundred "radicals". The British broadcasters generally focussed more closely on the few than on the many, but would they do the same later this month?
The royals on tour
Prince Charles is in Canada, the Queen is expected to go there next year and William is preparing to go to New Zealand and Australia – but are there signs that the locals are revolting?
Polls published in advance of Charles’ visit show support for Canada’s constitutional monarchy is weak, even if the public’s frosty opinion of the Prince of Wales himself has begun to warm just a bit.
So farewell then Princess Diana?
**Read our special report about the Diana inquest**
Watching the Diana inquest unfold, you sometimes felt that the lunatics had taken over the asylum.
With an extraordinary cast of characters straight out of central casting, it would have been rich fodder for any scriptwriter on a surreal soap opera.
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The Wall
