When you annoy your readers with your opinion
Tackling certain topics can be tricky, but it's necessary
A reader on my Facebook page didn't like the theory I posted:
"If the late Queen Elizabeth II had put a stop to Andrew and Fergie decades ago, we wouldn't have a Harry and Meghan now. Agree or disagree?"
I am “stirring the pot” (his words). Perhaps this reader thinks that I am attacking the late Queen. Far from it. If we want the monarchy to survive, we need to meet the issues head-on. I loved Elizabeth II, but she let Prince Andrew have too much leeway. I often questioned her rationale over Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson. The Queen appeared extremely permissive about everything they did.
My belief is that Harry thought he could get away with anything after seeing the Duke of York glide through life unchallenged. It took the Epstein scandal to bring Andrew down. Harry, too, is ballsy enough to think he’s invincible, which explains his arrogance towards the press in court regarding phone hacking. He showed up with only his feelings to guide him and fully expected to win.
Yes, this is Prince Harry, who partied in Las Vegas naked, drunk, and totally compromised. The royal family didn’t get enough embarrassment from Andrew, so good ol’ Harry thought he’d fill in the gaps.
Speaking of embarrassing, there’s Harry’s memoir “Spare” in which he announced his drug use and how blue his ‘todger’ was during his brother’s wedding. The prince then blathered on about killing members of the Taliban and entertained the fantasy of shooting his father’s car (with Charles in it). Charming.
It’s the allegations of rape and beatings of the Baka people in Zambia that have been the huge turning point, far more than the book. The Baka people were meant to be protected by Harry’s African Parks charity, but instead have suffered brutality at the hands of the rangers. The prince was the president of African Parks for several years and is now on the board. This is on his watch. Has he said one word about it? Not once. Superhero Harry slaying media dragons hasn’t spoken up for the Baka, and neither has his self-proclaimed feminist wife.
Harry once boasted in typical idiotic buzzword style: 'The African Parks model is exactly what conservation should be about – putting people at the heart of the solution.' What solution is that, Harry? The Final Solution?
Harry is now fully in Prince Andrew’s territory as a powerful man abusing or silencing innocent people. It shows that Harry is not simply a bratty man-child. His silence proves he condones the horror of what happened and won’t answer for it. I have no words for this man or his wife.
Meghan, for her part, likely assumed she’d get brand deals without having to do actual royal duties, like Sarah Ferguson – the only difference being that Sarah was divorced from her Duke.
Post-divorce, Fergie was allowed to sell the Duchess of York title left and right, heading stateside to hock cranberry juice, children’s books, and to promote a weight loss company. The cherry on Fergie’s cake was that she remained tight with the Royal Family on a personal level, regardless of her shameless behavior during her marriage and after. So why wouldn’t Meghan think she could get away with that too?
In 2020, it was reported that Sarah was creating a lifestyle brand (sound familiar?) with a range of products falling under names like Ginger & Moss, The Duchess Collection, and Fergie's Farm. Two years on, it all bottomed out and the shady investment firm who gave her “unexplained” loans went bankrupt. This was a decade after her cash-for-access scandal, where she sold Prince Andrew’s influence to the highest bidder.
"500,000 pounds when you can, to me, to open doors," Fergie confidently offered the undercover journalist who caught her red-handed. She is quite literally incapable of dealing honestly with honest people.
It grinds my gears to think that the Queen could’ve stopped all of this nonsense long ago but chose not to. The Duke of York was finally stripped of everything in order to fight his sexual abuse case "as a private citizen" in 2022 but too little, too late. Now we are forced to watch history repeat itself in the form of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who’ve upped the sh*t stakes by a thousand percent. The Prince and Princess of Wales are being harassed at an unprecedented level by the supporters of the Sussexes as well as by people who profit off of division, racial or otherwise. The Princess of Wales has been called a racist, photoshopped as a beaten wife (which infers William physically abused her), and to top it all off, Catherine has had her medical records hacked so that the world can find out more on her surgery.
Where will it end? Is this really what Queen Elizabeth II wanted for the monarchy?
I agree that Elizabeth II turned a blind eye to Andrew's failings for far too long. Everyone has a weakness. He was hers.