After Andrew and Fergie embarrass the Queen a party at the Palace for the Beckhams, a royal historian says there's only one fitting punishment - banish them!
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at the Buckingham Palace breakfast table yesterday when the Queen and Prince Philip confronted the headlines about the hideously inappropriate use of their London residence for a party for multi-millionaire ex-footballer David Beckham’s six-year-old daughter Harper.
The Queen, even at 91, remains a woman who’s always been sensitively attuned to the PR requirements of constitutional monarchy.
At a time when she is due to receive £370 million of public money for refurbishment of a building that is funded by the British taxpayer, she must have winced.
This party for the privileged child of a man with an estimated fortune of £280 million was arranged and organised by her second son, Prince Andrew, whose much-criticised role as Britain’s special representative for trade and investment earned him the nickname ‘Air Miles Andy’.
And I suspect Prince Philip — never at a loss for a barbed and trenchant reaction — will have done a great deal more than wince at the further revelation that the fiasco appears to have been the inspiration of his former daughter-in-law Sarah Ferguson, who was at the party with her ex-husband and their 27-year-old younger daughter, Princess Eugenie.
David Beckham with his daughter Harper for the six-year-old's birthday at Buckingham Palace
Harper Beckham inside Buckingham Palace in a photo her father, David Beckham, uploaded to Instagram
Victoria Beckham with Sarah Ferguson backstage at a Spice Girls gig in 1999 and David Beckham with Prince Andrew at Wembley Football Stadium
British pop stars and royalty (left to right) Sarah Ferguson, Mel C, Mel B, Princess Eugenie, Emma Bunton, Princess Beatrice and Victoria Beckham attend the Spice Girls concert at Earls Court Arena on December 15, 1999 in London
This episode once again highlights the uncomfortable position of the Duchess of York, who was divorced by Andrew in 1996 and who has not been a member of the Royal Family in an official sense for more than 20 years.
Yet despite this — and the fact that she was filmed in 2010 grubbily offering access to him in return for payment of £500,000 — she continues to share her former husband’s royal residences.
In the wake of that scandal, she was not invited to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011, but still she continues to loom large on the royal scene.
Only last month I watched her, ‘representing His Royal Highness The Duke of York’, making a quasi-regal entrance into Westminster Abbey to be received by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster at the celebrity-packed service of thanksgiving for the life and work of Ronnie Corbett CBE.
To all intents and purposes, Fergie was being treated with the deference due to a member of the Royal Family.
Her involvement in the Beckham party has drawn particular criticism from the Queen’s former press spokesman, Dickie Arbiter, who described the affair as ‘tawdry’.
England football captain David Beckham stands with his wife, Victoria, as he shows off his OBE
He said of the event: ‘What a nonsense. What are they doing there? What is Eugenie having a party there for? What is Sarah York doing, having organised it — allegedly? None of them has got a right to be there.
'Is it being opened up as a theme park? It devalues what the place is all about.’
Perhaps the worst aspect of this ill-judged jamboree is the insensitivity of the timing.
This year, people have lost their lives in terrorist atrocities, and, in the case of the Grenfell Tower fire, not only lives but homes and all their possessions.
Yet here is Buckingham Palace being flagrantly misused as a playground for the rich and the famous.
Not surprisingly, people have taken to social media to vent their anger at the lack of compassion this conveys.
‘Harper Beckham at Buckingham Palace? Pass the sick-bag,’ wrote one man. ‘What about Grenfell victims who have nothing?’
A woman added bitterly: ‘Don’t think they’d allow me to do that, so why should she be allowed?’
Dickie Arbiter reserves his fiercest criticism for a photograph of Harper Beckham placed by her parents on the social media site Instagram.
She is dressed in a long blue Cinderella-style dress in the centre of the Buckingham Palace quadrangle, holding a red balloon bearing a message from her mother Victoria, with the words, ‘Our little birthday princess. X. Kisses’.
Arbiter, usually a model of restraint where the Royal Family is concerned, asks: ‘Why can’t Joe Public, when they go in on the Buckingham Palace tour, have their pictures taken in the quadrangle? Why do the Beckhams get special treatment?’
It’s a question many will ask, especially in the current climate of tragedy and hardship.
Of course, the regal aspirations of Posh and Becks are well known.
Not for nothing was their former 24-acre, grade II-listed Hertfordshire mansion dubbed by the media ‘Beckingham Palace’.
The Duke of York shakes hands with Manchester United's David Beckham as captain Roy Keane (left) looks on before their Charity Shield match against Chelsea at Wembley in 2000
David Beckham was at the real Palace to receive an OBE in 2003, but he seems to consider this an inadequate recognition of his career.
In 2013, the prospect of a knighthood was scotched by the Honours Committee that adjudicates on gongs, after suggestions (which he denied) that he had been involved in tax avoidance schemes.
His image was badly damaged by leaked emails in which he was alleged to have referred to the committee as ‘a bunch of c***s’ and — because he believed his charity work should have been a passport to a knighthood — as ‘those old unappreciative c***s’.
A further email rant by Beckham — also leaked — contained a vicious attack on the new Forces sweetheart, Katherine Jenkins OBE.
Beckham is alleged to have asked: ‘Katherine Jenkins OBE for what? Singing at the rugby and going to see the troops plus taking coke. F***ing joke’.
David Beckham and Victoria Beckhamat Buckingham Palace, London in April 2017
Jenkins admitted the allegation of drug-taking and her management pointed out it had taken place more than a decade before she received her OBE.
Yet the incident showed Beckham in his true, appalling colours.
And although no knighthood for him has been forthcoming, his wife was at Buckingham Palace this year to receive the OBE for ‘services to fashion’.
This mystified observers of our honours system to whom the alleged ‘services’ may seem obscure.
Dismayed by criticism of the party yesterday, a Buckingham Palace spokesman was forced into a defence strategy. ‘From time to time,’ he said, ‘members of the Royal Family who live at royal residences invite guests to visit them privately.’
A spokesman for Beckham insisted: ‘It was a private tea party.’
And it could well have stayed private, but for the vainglorious actions of the Beckhams.
Within days, they had shared news of the party with their 55 million followers on Instagram, posting photos, including one of Harper and friends with Princess Eugenie above the caption: ‘Lucky Harper meeting a real-life princess at the Palace.’
It not only lays the Beckhams open to allegations of social climbing, vulgarity and bad taste.
The use of Buckingham Palace for such an insensitive purpose also lays the Duke of York and his ex-wife open to accusations of flagrant bad judgment.
Even though Andrew’s office hastened to say he paid all the expenses for the party.
It would be hard, in this case, to disagree with Dickie Arbiter, one of the best, most reliable royal spokesmen of recent years.
Buckingham Palace is not, and never should be, a playground for the privileged few.
It is a building funded by the British taxpayer, and access to it should never depend on mere wealth and social aspiration.
Not for the first time, the Duke of York — and in particular his ghastly former wife — have dragged the monarchy through the mire.
They should use Andy’s Air Miles to fly to some distant corner of the Commonwealth and remain there in disgrace.
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