It’s the 80th birthday of the Duchess of Normandy, aka Queen Elizabeth II. I’ll spare you the treacly tributes – clear subtext: carry on till you drop to spare us Charles III. The real world has intruded through the unlikely personage of her tasteless, laddish grandson Prince Harry, who has just graduated from Sandhurst (the British West Point). Note this clever headline. Dixit Harry:
There’s no way I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country.
Harry is plainly not bright or self-controlled enough to fake this, and will know the names of Matty Hull, Karl Shearer, and Alexander Tweedie – soldiers of his regiment killed in Iraq. So give him credit for a touch of the right stuff.
Couldn’t happen in a real, manly republic.
Author: James Wimberley
James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three.
I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia.
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I am sure Harry knows the name, James Hewitt, as well, though perhaps not the man.
From the timesonline link:
'One senior Army officer said that it was "eminently possible" that he could be serving in a conflict zone within 12 months, although he is likely require at least one four-man SAS protection unit.'
So, if he goes to war as a soldier, he still gets his own security detail?
One small comment… should he ever ascend to the throne, Charles has expressed a desire to be crowned George VII not Charles III.