Living and Dying like Royalty

Whenever I hear people talk of how difficult it is for the UK's royal family, I always think back to this rant.





So then, slightly bizarre weekend; Nepal provided a most excellent example of the dangers of inbreeding amongst royals as they started the weekend with one king, had a new one by Saturday, and another new one by Sunday night. This was all due to the wacky antics of the Crown Prince Dipendra who was (allegedly) a tad peeved by his mothers refusal to endorse his choice of bride. Being a traditional sort, rather than embarking on a campaign of romance and melancholy in order to show his family the depth of the love that he held for this woman so scorned by his austere and old fashioned mother, he instead took an AK-47 and proceeded to shoot dead his father, mother, sister, 5 other members of the family, and then shot himself thus placing him in a coma from which he never awoke, and inadvertently making himself the king. He died on Sunday night and his Uncle Gyanendra who was fortuitously out of the country at the time is the new king.

Gosh, it's all very exciting isn't it? Regicide, matricide, patricide, fratricide, suicide...it's rather like one of those blood drenched fairy tales that one gets told when you were a child! Truth be known, I wouldn't have mentioned the incident at all were it not for the Prime Minister of Nepal's explanation for the massacre. He said it was an accident. Yes, that's right, the murder of 9 people with an automatic rifle...was an accident! What, was he cleaning it, fully loaded, in the family dining room when it went off by accident, his finger became stuck to the trigger and he was unable to control the gun from pointing around the room. Before he knew it, 9 members of his family lay dead, and he was so overcome with guilt and despair that he shot himself.

As porkies go, claiming that this is an accident is right up there with the episode of Blackadder where his rivals in the election accidentally brutally cut their heads off whilst combing their hair. It's also quite sad that the only reason that you or I now know that Nepal has a royal family is because their numbers are now much reduced. I know that our royals have been much criticised of late, but at least they have yet to butcher each other in an orgy of bloodshed. That said, it would certainly cut the civil list down to a reasonable amount and save the government the trouble of going through endless debates about the abolition of the monarchy put forward by backbench M.P.'s.

Actually, it may surprise you to know that I'm very much in favour of our royal family. Not in that horribly old fashioned "they do a marvelous job" sort of way that anyone with grandparents will be depressingly familiar with. No, I happen to think that although they are a bone idle bunch of semi-retarded morons who are vaguely aware that they get visited by a man called Tony every week in order for mummy to sign some documents to make laws, they are an economic boon to the country.

I realise that they do sap a sizable portion of taxes in order to finance their lifestyle (although I remain astounded that the Queen Mum managed to run up an overdraft in excess of £2 million; were the bank sending her nasty letters informing her that they would be charging her £10 for exceeding her authorised limit of £100? I somehow doubt it...) but they do bring in a vast amount of revenue simply by their very existence.
Tourists come to visit by the planeful, and many of them come to visit anything with a royal connection (particularly Americans which I find rather strange; they spent long enough trying to throw off the yoke of the oppressive and tyrannical British monarch so why are they so keen to immerse themselves in royal history? Do they see the castle and think it's a new Disneyland or something?).

Like many other European countries, we do have something in common with Nepal in that we butchered our Monarch and abolished our royal family. This was all courtesy of old wart face, Oliver Cromwell. Unlike many other European countries (Spain excepted as they had their decades of dictatorship more recently under Franco, after which a constitutional monarchy was instated) we restored our monarchy in the shape of Charles II. Barring a couple of altercations which saw the crown switch hands to William of Orange, it has been passed down without too much incident and with pretty much all their pomp, ceremony, and ostentation intact.

This stands us in pretty good stead in the tourism industry. Lets face it, other than our heritage there's bugger all reason why anyone would want to come to an island where the weather is frequently awful, the food could charitably said to be edible, and the only thing the people hate more than foreigners is somebody who lives about 5 miles down the road in a different village/town/city. So although the royals cost us a fortune, they make us a bigger one. If you have problems with this due to any inherent republicanism, I find that it helps to think of them as a sort of zoo. It costs a lot to maintain the exhibits due to their rarity, but people flock to see them for that very same reason. As long as the admission price is kept high enough then we'll keep making a profit from them. And we can always hope that Charles will finally snap and batter Prince Philip to death with a cricket bat...