Book Read Free

The Great Survivors

Page 33

by Peter Conradi


  Consolation for Queen Juliana was no doubt provided by her third daughter, Princess Margriet, who in 1967 married Pieter van Vollenhoven, a fellow student at Leiden University, who went on to have a suitably worthy career as a professor of risk management and chairman of a number of transport- and safety-related committees. Four children and more than four decades later, they remained married, with van Vollenhoven turning into a respected figure with quasi-royal status.

  The intervening years had led to more liberal attitudes towards who is – and who is not – a suitable marital partner for a prince or princess, but it has not made life easier for “spares” and their spouses – as demonstrated vividly in Britain by the travails of Prince Charles’s three younger siblings. These days, Princess Anne, born in 1950, is frequently described by the media as the most hard-working royal, as a result of the more than five hundred official engagements she carries out each year. Yet in her youth, when she was pursuing an international showjumping career that included an appearance at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, she was renowned for her grumpy outbursts; one of the most famous was at the 1982 Badminton Horse Trials when she shouted “naff off” at photographers trying to take her picture after she fell off her horse at a water jump.

  As Anne herself admitted, her temper almost got her into more serious trouble in 1974, when a twenty-year-old man with mental-health problems and armed with a gun tried to kidnap her and hold her ransom for £2 million as she was being driven back to Buckingham Palace after attending a charity event in nearby Pall Mall. Anne, who dived out of the car door, was unhurt, but the kidnapper shot and wounded two police officers, a driver and a journalist who tried to follow them in a taxi. “I nearly lost my temper with him, but I knew that if I did, I should hit him and he would shoot me,” Anne told police officers. Royal security was stepped up considerably thereafter.

  While Anne has gradually metamorphosed over the years into a national treasure, her younger brother Andrew, the Duke of York, born in 1960, has seen his personal and professional life come under rather stronger scrutiny. He has struggled to carve out a role for himself since he stepped down from the Royal Navy in 2001 after twenty-two years of service, and has faced criticism for his extravagant lifestyle: in 2007, for instance, he was dogged by accusations over his expenses in his role as ambassador for British Trade International (BTI), which that year came to £436,000. Potentially more damaging have been the business and personal contacts that Andrew has cultivated with senior figures in countries such as Libya, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. Following the emergence of pro-democracy movements in the Arab world and the civil war in Libya, the Prince’s relations with some of the region’s less savoury characters looked rather too friendly – and too personal.

  Before all of this, however, Andrew was forced to endure negative newspaper coverage over the break-up of his marriage to Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, whom he wed in July 1986. Although the Duke and Duchess agreed on an amicable separation in March 1992, any hopes of reconciliation were dashed that August when the Daily Mirror published surreptitiously taken photographs of John Bryan, the Duchess’s American financial advisor, in the act of sucking on the toes of a topless Sarah while they were on a Caribbean holiday together. She divorced Andrew in May 1996 but, despite remaining on good terms with her ex-husband as well as sharing custody of their daughters Beatrice and Eugenie, the Duchess was left with large debts: she reportedly owed between £3 and £4.2 million. The revenue-raising activities in the years that followed – including writing children’s books and an attempt to launch a media career in the United States – ended in failure. Her difficulties were compounded in May 2010 by the notorious “Fake Sheik” scandal, in which Sarah was recorded by a tabloid newspaper offering access to Prince Andrew, in his capacity as an official British trade ‌envoy, in return for £500,000.7

  Prince Edward, born in 1964, does not have the same wealthy foreign friends as his elder brother, and of Queen Elizabeth’s four children he is the only one not to have divorced. This does not mean, however, that he has been spared criticism. In Edward’s case this focused initially on his wife Sophie Rhys-Jones, who became Countess of Wessex on their marriage in 1999. Suspicions began to grow that Sophie, who had made her career in public relations, was trading on her royal connections in order to win business for her firm, RJH Public Relations, something that was apparently confirmed by another stunt by the News of the World’s “Fake Sheik”, who this time posed as a wealthy Arab with a leisure complex in Dubai, which he ‌wanted Sophie’s company to promote.8 In the days that followed, newspapers were filled with stories of crisis meetings. According to their accounts, the royal family was divided over what to do next: while Edward’s father the Duke of Edinburgh was angry that the press seemed to be dictating the agenda yet again, Prince Charles and his sister Anne argued that their brother and his wife should make a choice between their business activities and their royal status and privileges – which were considerable.

  The affair also inevitably focused attention on Edward’s own activities, which had already begun to cause embarrassment. The Prince had resigned his Royal Marines commission in 1987 to pursue a career in the performing arts, eventually setting up his own television production company, Ardent, which as well as making a loss year after year caused controversy by filming at St Andrews University, where Prince William was studying, in defiance of an agreement that the second in line to the throne should be allowed to pursue his studies free of media intrusion. Prince Charles was reported to be “incandescent with rage”, and a few days later the company announced it would stop making films about royalty. In March the following year, Edward and Sophie announced they were permanently stepping down from their business roles. The official reason was to support the Queen during her Golden Jubilee, but given that their decision was a permanent rather than a temporary one, no one was convinced. “Few were surprised when Prince Edward announced that his career in TV was over,” commented the Guardian. “The only mystery was how ‌it had lasted so long.”9

  The current generation of Continental “spares” have also run into problems. In the Netherlands, Prince Friso (born Johan Friso in 1968, but the “Johan” was dropped in 2004), the second son of Queen Beatrix, could not have foreseen the trouble that lay ahead when he met a glamorous young woman named Mabel Wisse Smit in 2001 while working at Goldman Sachs in London.

  When the couple’s engagement was announced just over two years later, it seemed like a match made in public-relations heaven. Wisse Smit, a former Balkans expert at the United Nations, and long-running head of the Brussels office of financier George Soros’s Open Society Institute, was vetted by the Dutch secret service and approved as a suitable bride. For the Prince the union had the added benefit of quashing persistent rumours about his sexuality – which had become so prevalent that an official announcement was made in 2001 denying he was homosexual.

  Before long however it emerged that Mabel had some rather awkward skeletons in her closet. It was bad enough that her previous lovers included Muhamed Sacirbey, the former ambassador of Bosnia-Herzegovina to the United Nations, who was by that time incarcerated in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he was fighting attempts by the Bosnians to extradite him on charges of misappropriating public funds. Even more embarrassing were claims she had also had a relationship with Klaas Bruinsma, one of the most notorious figures in the Dutch mafia.

  The Dutch press’s interest was understandable. Bruinsma, born into a wealthy brewing family, had become an infamous underworld boss with links to drug trafficking and a series of murders. One of his victims was found embedded in concrete; his legs and penis had been cut off before he was killed. Bruinsma himself was gunned down in 1991 at the age of thirty-seven after a late-night drinking session at the Amsterdam Hilton ended in an argument.

  Wisse Smit had initially told Jan Peter Balkenende, the prime minister, that she had “vaguely” known Bruinsma for a short time in 1989 when s
he was a student, after meeting him through their shared love of sailing – but had broken off contact with him when she discovered how he earned his money. Bruinsma’s former bodyguard, Charlie da Silva, alleged in an interview with Dutch television however that their relationship went far beyond that – and indeed, that the gangster had been smitten by her, so much so that she was the only woman he had allowed on board his yacht.

  The scandal that became known as Mabelgate was underway. And, as the press continued to dig, Prince Friso finally admitted in October 2003 that he and his fiancée had been less than forthcoming about her contacts with the mafia boss. Balkenende, visibly perturbed, went on television to announce that his cabinet would not submit the couple’s marriage to parliament for its approval, a prerequisite for maintaining Friso’s position in the succession to the throne. Mabel, he claimed, had given “false and incomplete information”, adding: “Trust has been violated… there is no remedy for untruths.”

  Friso, third in line to the throne, had to choose between his official position and Mabel. He chose Mabel. Their wedding in April 2004 in Delft was described rather cruelly by the Dutch press as a B-rated affair. Although the Queen and other members of the Dutch royal family attended, there were few representatives from other royal houses. In a televised interview shown earlier in the week, the couple admitted making public-relations mistakes.

  Until his horrific skiing accident in February 2012, Friso inhabited a curious halfway house, like his aunts Irene and Christina (and two of Margriet’s sons, Pieter-Christiaan and Floris, who both made what were deemed unsuitable marriages in 2005). They and their respective spouses are still entitled to call themselves His (or Her) Royal ‌Highness and Prince or Princess.10 However, although still part of the Koninklijke familie (royal family), they are not considered members of the Koninklijk Huis (royal house). Thus Friso did not appear on formal occasions – on Prinsjesdag, for example, he did not join his mother and two brothers on the balcony of the Noordeinde Palace in The Hague to wave to the crowds below. This does not prevent the Dutch media taking almost as much interest in Friso and his wife as they do in other members of the family – so much so that his Alpine disaster was turned into a national tragedy.

  No other European prince or princess has been obliged to renounce his or her rights to the throne, but some have certainly endured problems of their own, including relentlessly hostile press coverage. Prince Laurent, second son of King Albert II of Belgium, has suffered especially badly – even more so than his elder brother Philippe. As a young man he struggled with his studies – or so claimed Rudy Bogaerts, the head of a private school in Uccle, who tutored him for eight years. “In one of the first lessons Laurent asked what a half plus a half was,” Bogaerts said in an interview with the news magazine ‌Humo. “He didn’t know it.”11

  The Prince’s passion for cars was also to get him into trouble. The owner of several Ferraris, he was said to be especially fond of racing the TGV train along the stretch of motorway between the Belgian border and Paris. Belgian foreign-ministry officials became used to having to take care of speeding tickets that had been issued in France, elsewhere in Europe and even in America. On one occasion, Laurent was reportedly pulled over by a female state trooper outside Washington. “You can’t do this to me: I’m the prince of Belgium,” he protested. “Yeah,” the policewoman is said to have replied. “And ‌I’m the Queen of Sheba.”12

  And then there were the inevitable stories of relationships with unsuitable women – and the seemingly permanent financial difficulties. Denied a civil-list payment until 2001, when he was thirty-seven, and forced to rely on handouts from his parents, Laurent was paid instead through the IRGT, the Institut Royal pour la Gestion Durable des Ressources Naturelles et la Promotion des Technologies Propres (Royal Institute for the Sustainable Management of Natural Resources and the Promotion of Clean Technology), an organization he founded in 1994.

  Not surprisingly, many Belgians believed the real reason behind the government’s decision in 1991 to change the rules to allow women to succeed to the throne was to make it more unlikely that Laurent would ever become king. Before the change he was third in line behind his father and elder brother, but ahead of his elder sister Princess Astrid, to succeed his childless uncle Baudouin. He has since dropped down to twelfth place and, with time, will go down further still.

  Laurent’s reputation improved following his marriage in April 2003 to Claire Combs, an Anglo-Belgian property surveyor who was born in Bath and grew up in Wavre, outside Brussels. But speculation continued about the poor state of his finances. Matters appeared to become more serious in December 2006, when the Prince’s name surfaced in connection with a corruption scandal centring on claims that Belgian naval funds had been used to refurbish Villa Clémentine, the home in Tervuren, outside Brussels, he shares with Claire and their three children. The following month, after his father signed a special Royal Decree, Laurent was subpoenaed, questioned by the police and appeared in court, where he declared he had no reason to suspect the funding of the renovations was illegal. Although Laurent was a witness rather than a defendant, it was a first for a senior member of the Belgian royal family – and an embarrassment for the palace. The Belgian media reported that Albert barred his son from royal functions for four months as a sign of his displeasure.

  Laurent survived the crisis, but the criticisms continued. The Prince, according to his former advisor Noël Vaessen, a retired colonel sentenced to two and half years in jail for his role in the fraud, was “obsessed” with spending money and buying cars, and during the 1990s had spent most of the annual allowance, which currently stands at close to €300,000, on expensive watches, clothes and going out. The following year members of parliament demanded a cut in Laurent’s civil-list allowance after it was claimed he had used government money to buy a €1 million villa in Italy.

  In Sweden, by contrast, Crown Princess Victoria’s younger brother Carl Philip and their glamorous younger sister Madeleine had for a long time a gentler ride with the press, not least because both became involved in long-term relationships at a relatively early age: Madeleine with Jonas Bergström, a lawyer, and Carl Philip with Emma Pernald, who worked in public relations. In August 2009, six months after her elder sister’s engagement, it was announced that Madeleine too was going to get married: although no date was set, it was expected to be in late 2010 or early 2011.

  As Victoria’s own wedding, scheduled for June 2010, approached, however, things started to go wrong with both her siblings’ relationships. Carl Philip had broken with Pernald after ten years, and in early 2010 was reported to be having an affair with Sofia Hellqvist, a glamour model who had appeared on Paradise Hotel, a reality television show, and posed topless for photographers with a python draped artistically around her body. An invitation to the palace to meet Carl Philip’s parents seemed out of the question.

  Then, in what was potentially even more damaging for the palace, reports began to appear that all was not well with Madeleine’s relationship either. At the Princess’s side for eight years, Bergström, with his upper-class background, successful career and good looks, had seemed the ideal royal spouse – much more suitable, in the eyes of some, than Victoria’s own fiancé Daniel Westling. Yet suddenly the couple stopped being seen together in public and the Swedish tabloids began to fill with stories of Bergström’s “double life” and hedonism.

  Asked in April what was going on with her daughter, Queen Silvia said the wedding was being postponed, but insisted “everything is OK”. Not everybody – least of all the tabloid royal watchers – were convinced. Their doubts grew even stronger after the Norwegian weekly Se og Hør, which had done so much to delve into the past life of Crown Princess Mette-Marit before her marriage, published an interview with Tora Uppstrøm Berg, a twenty-one-year-old Norwegian student and former handball player who claimed to have slept with Bergström during a trip he made without Madeleine to the ski resort of Åre in April the previous year.
>
  A few days later it was official. An hour after Madeleine left Stockholm on board a plane bound for New York, where she was due to spend several weeks working for the World Childhood Foundation, a children’s charity founded by her mother, came an announcement from the palace that she and Bergström had “made a joint decision to go separate ways”.

  Royal engagements are serious affairs and not normally broken off. While the Swedish media went into a frenzy, it was left to King Harald of Norway to make what was probably the most apt comment. “It’s good that the breach is now and not after the wedding,” he said.

  Madeleine remained in America and, with time, the relentless press attention on her private life began to fade. When she attended her elder sister’s wedding that June, looking glamorous in a blue chiffon dress and a diamond tiara, she was accompanied not by a new love but by her brother, Carl Philip. She is since said to have found love with Chris O’Neill, an American financier.

  Elsewhere in Europe, Prince Joachim, the second son of Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, has also been obliged to cope with some harsh newspaper coverage after the collapse of his first marriage to Alexandra, his Hong Kong-born first wife, who had become a favourite with the Danes – not least because of the speed with which she learnt their difficult language. His reputation appeared restored after he married Marie Agathe Odile Cavallier, a glamorous Parisienne twelve years Alexandra’s junior, in May 2008. The marriage of Infanta Elena, the eldest daughter of King Juan Carlos of Spain, also broke down after just over a decade. She and her husband, who had two children, stopped living together in November 2007; their divorce was finalized in January 2010.

  Elena’s younger sister, the Infanta Cristina, faced problems of a different character: in late 2011 her husband, Iñaki Urdangarin, the Duke of Palma de Mallorca, a former Olympic handball player turned businessman, became embroiled in a scandal involving the alleged embezzlement of large amounts of public money from the Nóos Institute, a non-profit foundation that he headed for several years. That December, as the case rumbled on and the damage to the monarchy grew, the palace took the unusual step of announcing that Urdangarin would no longer take part in official ceremonies involving the royal family.

 

‹ Prev