The Thamesmead Grump

 ***SPECIAL ROYAL EDITION***

(WITH PICTURES)

According to the Daily Mirror, to find the worst royal crisis in 85 years, you would have to go back to 1936 and the abdication of Edward VIII.

For those of you not entirely familiar with this bit of royal history, an American socialite called Wallace Simpson who had, to put it frankly, been putting it about a bit and was already on her third Husband, started an affair with the, yet uncrowned, Edward VIII. The scandal rumbled on for months until the story finally broke and Edward was given the option of dumping the broad or giving up the throne; he chose the latter, much to the chagrin of the establishment who assumed he would do the decent thing.

In his Grandfather's time of course, he would have just added Mrs S. to his list of favourite prostitutes and married some simpering non-entity for breeding purposes like his Great Nephew was supposed to 45 years later. (I'll get to him, don't worry).

Personally, I don't think that was anything like as big a crisis; he might have been a Nazi sympathiser and he did give Allied military secrets to the Third Reich during WW2 and he may have married a thrice divorced American, but at least she was a white woman; and the Nazis weren't all that bad anyway.

A more recent royal crisis began in 1981 with the rolling disaster known as the Marriage of Charles, Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer. Charles, as we all know actually had the total hots for another married woman, Camilla Parker-Bowles. This had been going on for some time before the arranged marriage to Diana and it was assumed that the usual royal arrangement would continue, i.e. Diana would act as a baby and royal heir factory while her Husband shagged Camilla to his heart's content.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Diana wasn't going to be the quiet little Wifey-at-home victim and caused a fuss. This led to a lot of unseemly interest in the couple, ultimately resulting in the death of Diana while being pursued by a bunch of paparazzi intent on getting photographs of her to add to the millions they already had. 

This disaster was entirely the fault of the paparazzi and not (this is important) the millions of ordinary people who wallowed in this stuff like pigs in shit and bought it up by the shed load.

To be clear, Harry and Megan is a much more serious issue than Charles and his Tampax Queen, and makes the death of Diana pale into insignificance but if you want to go back to a real royal crisis in any way comparable, you would need to go back to 1649 when we dragged our reigning monarch out onto a balcony in Whitehall and chopped his head off, and even then, only maybe.