Fruitful news day

[chrishansenhome]

The news has just come through that Prince William and Kate Middleton are to marry next year. This will dash the hopes of millions of women (and perhaps millions of gay men).

Royal weddings are an occasion in the United Kingdom for an outpouring of nationalistic rejoicing. The last occasion on which this happened was Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer's wedding at St. Paul's Cathedral in 1981. So we've been 20 years without—a long time between them.

What will happen? First, the poor lady will be inundated by paparazzi, newspapers, other media types, and will be hectored to within an inch of her life. This will be combatted by her husband, very fiercely. Second, I believe that the pressure will be off as far as William's parents and grandparents are concerned. While the Royal Family in general are not terribly intelligent in an intellectual way, they do seem to learn from their mistakes in a corporate way. I suspect that William will continue his military career and his wife will act as a loyal serviceman's wife. They will be living in North Wales (the island of Anglesey), which is where he is based. After seeing what the family did to his mother, I don't believe that William will allow a rerun of that; he'll protect her to the extent he can. Remember, she is university-educated (which Diana was not) and has been in "the world" in a way that Diana never was. She is not aristocratic; her parents are millionaires, true, but it is a self-made million and her background is distinctly middle-class. This will horrify some royal-watchers, but the vast mass of the British people will be happy to welcome Kate into the Royal Family.

I think the wedding will be low-key, no carriages through the streets, no out-of-control wedding garments, that kind of thing. The economic circumstances of the time mean that the Royal Family would be particularly tin-eared to insist on such stuff.

There will be some pressure to produce an heir and a spare, and I think that this will happen relatively quickly. That will relieve pressure on Prince Harry, of course, and allow him to marry at his leisure (or not, as the case may be).

The hounding has already started, with a BBC helicopter following the couple's car as it speeds toward Clarence House near Buckingham Palace.

The other piece of news that has impressed itself on me today is the sentencing of Alan Shadrake to 6 weeks in prison and a fine of more than £9,000 for contempt of court in Singapore. Shadrake wrote a book called Once a Jolly Hangman, which concerned the manner in which the death penalty is imposed and administered in Singapore.

I'm personally not happy with this result; I don't believe that a book of this sort is any more harmful to Singapore's judiciary than the history of Singaporean justice has been. However, I can only believe that Shadrake is either colossally stupid, or is on a drive to increase sales of his book. Singapore is an easy place to avoid if you need to do that. Shadrake is based in Malaysia, and from there he could go anywhere he liked without touching down at Changi. However, he chose to go to Singapore, get arrested, be tried, and sentenced. Why be a martyr unnecessarily?

His lawyer says that Shadrake has been disappointed by the lack of support from the British public. There are two reasons for that. First, there has been a minimal amount of coverage in the news media here of the case. Second, Brits in general do not particularly want to support people who are stupid enough to deliberately put themselves in danger of this sort.

Comments

[baisuzhen.livejournal.com]

Well I'm not surprised at all by the sentencing. Over here ANY form criticism against the ruling Imperial family and their lapdogs would be met swiftly without hesitation.

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

Royal weddings are an occasion in the United Kingdom for an outpouring of nationalistic rejoicing. The last occasion on which this happened was Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer's wedding at St. Paul's Cathedral in 1981. So we've been 20 years without—a long time between them

not THAT long. The Duke and Duchess of York were married in 1986 at Westminster Abbey, and the Earl and Countess of Wessex in 1999 in St George's Chapel, Windsor. The latter was rather quiet, as royal weddings go, but the Yorks in the Abbey was pretty splashy - and since the Duke was (and remains) fourth in line to the throne, I suspect there may well have been was a public holiday for his wedding in 1986.

[a note of my personal antiquity: I remember getting a day off school for Princess Margaret's wedding 5 May 1960. My cousin Sallie gave birth to her first daughter Elizabeth that day, and I remember feeling sorry for Sallie (as only a 6yr old can) that she'd had to be in hospital on the day when the rest of us had a holiday.]

[chrishansenhome.livejournal.com]

The sentencing doesn't surprise me at all. What does surprise me is that Shadrake offered himself so willingly as a sacrificial lamb. He could not have been unaware of what was likely to happen if he showed up in Singapore. He's likely to serve a much longer sentence than 6 weeks; he has said he doesn't have any money so cannot pay the fine. They'll lengthen his sentence then. There is also the little matter of criminal libel (? I think) that the police are considering. And to put the icing on the cake, he's said he'll add some more material to the next edition of the book, and the judges aren't very happy about that.

He might be a good writer (I haven't read the book yet) but he's a piss-poor operator.

[chrishansenhome.livejournal.com]

The news outlets are all comparing this to Charles and Diana in 1981. No one is mentioning the Yorks or the Wessexes in this connection, much less the understated hitching of Charles and Horse-Face^Wer, Camilla a few years ago. There wasn't a public holiday for the Yorks, and the Wessexes only elicited a few public comments on the fact that no one thought Edward would be getting married in the first place.

I really think that they'll choose a rather sedate wedding in deference to the fact that people are losing their jobs and the public purse (which will have to defray a lot of the cost, especially that of policing the areas they'll be passing through) is a bit bare at the moment. We'll see in a few weeks' time. They're meeting with "advisers" today to start wedding planning.

I suppose Beardy^Wer...His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury will be witnessing the vows.

[baisuzhen.livejournal.com]

That's the thing that puzzles me too. Any sane and educated learned person knows just what kind of "judicial" system Singapore has, and he willingly step onto its shores.

Publicity junkie? Or simply trying to prove beyond a doubt that what he wrote was accurate to the bone?