Cop (26) a load of this right royal bullshit: The monarchy are parasites telling everyone else to suck less blood...
The supine British media allows an obscenely wasteful family to cosplay they're greener than Kermit.
If the Queen was truly concerned about “the children” as her video message to COP-26 suggested perhaps she stop paying Prince Andrew’s legal fees and tell him to go to the US to face questioning. And perhaps if Princes Charles were the ecological hero that the newspapers present him as, he’d ditch the palaces, and drop the army of flunkies that follow him around rather than pretending that one old car which runs on cheese and white wine dregs means anything.
And if we truly had a free press, we might have a single mainstream newspaper willing to scream about the hypocrisy of a woman who has lived in palaces for her entire life, her every need catered for by flunkeys, exhorting the world to waste less and preserve more. Monarchy is the embodiment of excess, the most throrough possible manifestation of privilege.
On the front pages of The Sun (“Phil the green”), The Times (“Answer the call of future generations, urges Queen”), The Daily Mail (“Green Queen and a deeply personal ultimatum”), and The Daily Telegraph (“Rise above politics for the sake of our children”) alike, the Queen was presented as symbol, rising above politics and transcending the politics of today. Not one of those stories mentioned that the Queen used arcane laws to ensure that she — and her family — are the only people exempted from a major initiative to cut carbon emissions.
It’s not a secret; in June, The Guardian broke the story on the sovereign’s use of Queen’s consent to ensure that she alone — as one of Scotland’s largest landowners — is not required to comply with the law designed to facilitate the construction of pipelines to heat buildings using renewable energy.
When the Queen said that leaders should “answer the call of future generations,” she forgot to mention that she intends to let that call go to answer phone and leave follow up messages on read. And the right-wing press, which fetishises the monarch and pretends that she’s the living definition of duty rather than a shrewd, tactical, and self-interested old operator, enabled that deception.
But The Telegraph, The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Times all found space to highlight that the Queen named princes Philip, Charles, and William but not Harry in her speech. The sleight — intended or imagined — was more important than even tangentially noting the huge carbon footprints of the senior royals, and the vast size of their travelling and household staffs.
Prince Charles told the climate summit that Earth is in “the last chance saloon” and that “the future of humanity and nature herself are at stake.” This is the same man who, according to multiple sources, often changes his clothes five times a day, and has valets to do tasks as menial as squeezing toothpaste — from a crested silver dispenser, no less — onto his toothbrush.
During the 2002 theft trial of the former butler Paul Burrell — which collapsed after the Queen ‘remembered’ he had told her that he was taking items belonging to Diana, Princess of Wales for safe keeping — it emerged in evidence that when Prince Charles broke his arm, he had his head valet, Michael Fawcett, hold his specimen bottle. This year, Fawcett was left holding the blame in the ‘cash for access’ scandal that the Prince is studiously pretending he knew nothing about.1
The reality of the Royals’ lifestyles does not intrude on the fantasies presented by the papers. On The Sun’s front page, the Duchess of Cambridge playing with a small amount of soil prompts the headline “Getting one’s hands dirty”, while in The Daily Mail experienced amateur proctologist to the royals Robert Hardman simpers of the Queen’s video message, “that’s how to steal the show”.
Another slice of pure propaganda appeared in The Times, under the headline Cambridges go to Glasgow and muck in for the planet the pages oleaginous royal correspondent Valentine Low slobbered:
As the politicians talked, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge got their hands dirty — literally — with grassroots initiatives encouraging people to live a more sustainable life.
In a visit to the East End of Glasgow to meet Scouts learning how to combat climate change, they made vegetarian burgers, threw wildflower seed bombs and took part in a bicycle maintenance workshop.
The implication that was while politicians were “all talk”, the Duke and Duchess were all action. In actual fact, it was just another of the photo opportunities in their ongoing cold war with the Sussexes. Like his father, William is a huge fan of private jets, servants tasked to deal with tiny inconveniences, and large palaces with heating bills to the requirements of entire villages.
If there were such a thing as a “royal reporter” rather than a class of sycophants grown fat on access and an easy life of press releases and repetition, we might have seen some news reports highlighting the gulf between the Queen’s rhetoric — no doubt supplied in part by her government — and her family’s actions.
Prince Phillip’s death brought out a tide of confected sentiments from the press and wider British media (including many suggestions that he “knew hardship” despite being born into royalty himself and spending most of his life as the curmudgeonly and decidely racist consort of a queen). When the Queen goes, the tsunami of false sentiments, enforced mourning, and fictionalisation will drown out all other news.
The Royal PR operation around COP-26 is part of rolling the pitch for Prince Charles’ long-awaited/dreaded (delete depending on your level of delusion). It’s an attempt to reshape the narrative around ‘the firm’ once again, part of their endless battle to be ‘relevant’. The British press is complicit in that effort just as the Royals play along with the tabloid protection racket that provides them relative protection from scandal in return for photo ops and twee calendars featuring William and Kate’s children.
Being lectured on climate change, waste, and the future of the planet by the Royal Family is like being told to watch your veins by a swarm of hungry ticks already fat and full with your blood. It’s not easy being green — Kermit was right and Boris Johnson was wrong — but it’s very easy being blue blooded when you have almost the entire British press prepared to tell fairy stories about you.
Fawcett was at the centre of another scanal in 2002 when it was suggested that he had been selling gifts given to the Prince, keeping a cut, and “swelling Charles’ coffers by up to £100,000 a year”. He was nicknamed “Fawcett the Fence” but somehow swiftly returned to Charles orbit once the scandal subsided.