Right Royal Whingers

Here are my thoughts on the forthcoming royal wedding.

I don’t really give too much of a fuck one way or the other.

There. That’s told you.

On balance however, I’d say I’m broadly in favour of it, and the whingers and naysayers can piss off.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of the royals by any stretch of the imagination. And don’t even get me started on Diana’s death. For me, its aftermath was like some terrifying Twilight Zone episode where you woke up to find everyone you knew had been replaced by a terrifying race of retarded aliens. And they could read your mind if you didn’t look sad enough. And if they found you were thinking less-than-worshipful thoughts about the People’s Princess, they’d zap you dead on the spot.

Your parents. Your friends. The man in the corner shop. Absolutely everyone you knew had had their brains scooped out and replaced by these special needs pod people.

And in desperation, you thought you were going to take the matter to the government.

And then the prime minister came on the news, and you saw he was one of them too.

Brrrr.

But Diana aside, I generally view the royal family in much the same way as I view, say, coffee tables. I’m not going to rave about them, or worship them, or go out of my way for a fleeting glimpse of one. They’re just there.

Yet I’m grudgingly willing to concede that they have a place in a well-ordered universe. And that - through no great gifts of their own - the world would be a slightly worse place without them.

You want President Cameron and First Lady SamCam living in the British White House and flying about in Air Force One?

Really?

From where I stand, the cost of the Royals - and even of the Wills-and-Kate wedding - is ultimately pretty small beans compared to the war in Iraq and bailing out Ireland and buying new nukes from America and God only knows what other shit we have to pay for out of our taxes whether we want it or not.

Now, I haven’t got the exact figures to hand any more than the Guardian-dwelling royal hatas, but – in the spirit of democracy and social equality they purport to so admire – I can only conclude that my unfounded back-of-a-fag-packet bullshit is just as good as theirs.

And I’m just as entitled to make shit up I understand nothing about, with no economic background or training whatsoever.

And so I’ll say with professorial certainty that the substantial investment in the royal wedding will be recouped several times over from tourists.

Because it just will be.

It just will, all right?

So shut up.

Admittedly, I have no earthly way of knowing what the costs and benefits really will be, and how they’ll really tally up on the day. But that’s much like the Zoe Williamses and Polly Toynbees and Tanya Golds of this world, and they don’t let a little thing like overwhelming ignorance stop them from yacking on like they know it all.

(Incidentally, their class-based bitterness and power-to-the-people schtick might be a bit more convincing if it didn’t come from a bunch of spoilt rich twats who walked into their cushy media jobs without breaking a sweat because Daddy went to Ampleforth with the editor.

Day boy, mind you. None of your toffs at the Guardian.*)

But I do know for sure that tourists eat this shit up like ice cream, and they’ll be all over a photogenic royal wedding like a tramp on chips.

Fact is, that’s what tourists like about England, and it’s pretty much all that tourists like about England. Like it or not.

To the watching, hotel-booking, open-topped-bus-tour-taking world, we’re a pretty little anachronistic Lilliput Lane of a country. A land of cream teas and cucumber sandwiches and cricket matches and gentle unworldly middle-aged ladies cycling to church on a Sunday morning. Royalty running through the entire fabric of our society like the words on a stick of Brighton rock.

Oddly, I can’t think of any country, anywhere, whose public image is so wildly out of kilter with its actual reality.

I always feel a bit sorry for poor old Buddy and Mary Sue Plaskett of Nebraska, who’ve spent their life savings on a once-in-a-lifetime European tour,

They’ll go to Paris, home of the elegant rude snooty type, and they’ll almost immediately meet an elegant rude snooty type.

And they’ll go to Italy, home of the oily charmer with the major Madonna/whore complex, and they’ll almost immediately meet an oily charmer with a major Madonna/whore complex.

And they’ll go to Ireland, home of the amiable twinkly-eyed drunk who never shuts up. And they’ll almost immediately meet an amiable twinkly-eyed drunk who never shuts up.

And finally, they’ll come over to good old Blighty. Home of the diffident-yet-charming well-spoken young gentleman with floppy hair, a slight stammer, and a severe yet oddly endearing case of emotional constipation.

And they’ll almost immediately meet a vomiting chav scumbag threatening to glass them in the face for looking at them funny.

Talk about false advertising.

It’s as if our national archetype – a strange, precious and delicate creature ill-adapted to the brutal realities of the modern world – actually keeled over and dropped dead some time in the late 1960s.

But we didn’t dare go public with this news for fear of completely destroying our tourist industry.

So whenever the tourists showed up, we gamely pretended it was still alive like the titular character in Weekend At Bernie’s. Buckingham Palace and all it implies is like the stick propping good old Bernie up - and the cunning little mechanism making his cold dead hand wave at the camera-snapping crowds.

You’d think that sooner or later, someone’s going to notice that the old fellow’s in the advanced stages of decomposition – and that his nose fell off some time in the mid-80s.

But maybe not, because – as any Londoner could tell you - foreign tourists aren’t the brightest little buttons in the box.

Keep him at a safe enough distance from the crowds, and his greenish pallor just looks like a bit of a hangover.

Still, if we’re going to have a royal family - and we’d haemorrhage tourists if we ever chucked ours out – it makes sense to have a proper one. Those foreign royals having professional jobs and riding round on bikes and watching the pennies are just shit. Do it or don’t do it.

Want to know what you call an old-fashioned, extravagant, wasteful monarchy?

A tautology.

But people who hate the royals have gone into serious overdrive on the subject of the royal wedding. Snobbery. Anachronism. Social inequality. Discriminatory class system. Blah blah blah blah blah.

Americans claim this snobbish preoccupation with social class and background is an exclusively English concern, and they don’t have it round their neck of the woods at all.

And credit where it’s due, I dare say they’re right.

This is why it’s such a commonplace event for the Harvard-bound WASPish Boston Brahmins to enter into serious relationships with the manky-toothed single teenage mothers on welfare.

Happens all the time in the classless States.

If I had a penny for every time I’d read about the impending nuptials of, say, Bruce Winthrop III and LaKeeSha Brice, I’d be a rich lady by now.

This classless ethos and effortless social fluidity must also be why 'not-your-typical-horsey-looking-princess-in-everything-but-name-at-all' Chelsea Clinton married a mullet-sporting trailer-dweller called Billy Bob Scratchett. Whose hobbies included demolition derbies, petty crime and working as a dishwasher at the Crab Shack - and who was descended from a penniless family of part-time rabbit thieves.

And why their union was marked by a simple, inexpensive ceremony of democratic modesty and communal inclusiveness. To which all of American’s socially-equal citizens, rich and poor alike, were warmly welcomed with open arms.

*Snork*

Simple fact. Snobbery, class structures and social inequality are in existence absolutely fucking everywhere that sentient beings exist.

This applies whether you’re living in a monarchy, a presidency, a dictatorship, a grimly prophetic communist dystopia or a whimsical distant planet inhabited by talking shoes.

Christ, there are probably chimpanzees sneering at other chimpanzees for eating their bananas funny and living in a crap tree.

I’m filing this inconvenient little fact, along with ‘men like sex more than women’ in the cabinet marked ‘that’s just bloody life. Don’t like it, tough shit.’

So simpering, cloying congratulations to Kate and Wills anyway, may they be very happy in the future and blah blah blah. Although apparently, Prince Harry won’t be going to the wedding.

It’s family only.

J x

* Like Ed Miliband attacking the PM for being upper-class, overprivileged and hopelessly out of touch with society’s dark underbelly. Fuck, yeah. While the young David Cameron was trying on his first top hat for Eton, the Miliband krew were selling crack on the mean streets of Primrose Hill. In the ghetto, it all come down to how you carry it, yo. Shit be real.