What do British people think of the following article criticising British attitudes to the Royal Family. Do they agree with it? The question to which the article responds was why people hate Sarah Ferguson but talked more generally about British behaviour. It’s from Australia.
“I’m watching The Duke and Duchess of Disaster right now on Australian TV, and angry that the true villain of the piece is not being highlighted.
Not the listless Andrew, and not Fergie, bumbling into get-rich schemes and get-popular schemes, because she didn’t fit the Edwardian straitjacket of The Firm. At least she didn’t have to walk the plank with her personal life that Princess Margaret did.
Not the late Prince Philip, Fergie-hater In Chief. I don’t expect him to have known any better, and I wouldn’t have looked to him for guidance on how to run a family to begin with.
Not the snooty judgemental dicks of Fleet Street that were the panel of clucking talking heads on the show, swooping down on every faux pas Fergie committed. Although I cannot but think that humanity would be well served by a few of those clucking royal watchers being reassigned to cover the shipping news.
No, the true villain of the piece is the people of Pomgolia (“a small country to the south of Scotland”),* who enable the entire farce, and give those clucking judgemental dicks of Fleet Street an audience. Who sit in judgement of Fergie for not being Cinderella out of central casting; who made her a laughing stock and a comic book villain just as they had with Margaret, just as they were to with Meghan; who enabled the much more damaged Diana to go on a wrecking tour, and deified her for looking the part of Cinderella. And only some rushed stage management has spared Catherine the same judgement. (Can we blame her for being Waity Katy? Especially when what she was delaying was the spotlight that would keep her being judged with daft names like that?)
The people of Pomgolia had unrealistic expectations about their Royal Family, that Fergie fell afoul of, because their popular notion of the Royal Family has become utterly muddle-headed. They want them to both be remote gods of yore, like Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, and approachable humans of contemporary times, like the bike-riding Dutch royals. That’s a hard standard to live up to, even if you have the benefit of being trained for it for life, like Charles and William have. Let alone the random petty aristocrats that have married into the Royal Family.
Has Fergie done silly things? Sure. But the opprobrium was vastly inflated, because of the untenable spotlight she was put under. And as divorces go, Fergie and Andrew have been an exemplar. It’s a pity the fairy-tale obsessive public don’t credit them for that.”
ENDS
*“Pomgolia”, an Australian term used to ridicule England very infrequently, is my new “Beef-Eaters” for Westerners: an othering term, which I use to remind people that need othering. This is the only royal family now that has this strange affliction, of lèse-majesté being enforced by the subjects of the kingdom on their royal family. From the outside, it truly looks bizarre. And it’s not the norm of royalty either.