Culture Taki Among the Royals The stupidity and sleaze of the British great and good are breaking into the open. Let’s change the subject from what Bibi wants and what the Donald gets for him, while hoping some interim government in Iran stops the bloodshed. Here’s some old news: With the exception of the frightful weather, the hypocrisy that masquerades for good manners, and their Ancient Roman–style dentistry practices, what I find exasperating about many Brits is their propensity for royal bootlicking. Men and women who otherwise should know better seem to go weak at the knees when some mini-brained royal appears. The British monarchy, needless to say, consists of a dysfunctional and until recently a physically unattractive family, yet down on their knees they go—grown men and women like peasants of yore, Uriah Heaps all, with no shame—as if they’re witnessing the second coming.   Having spent more than 40 years in merrie olde England—and having made many of my truly close friends there—I’ve met most of the royal clan. Hence I speak with some knowledge, but certainly no expertise. The family’s greed is astounding. Charles pockets truly disgusting sums from huge properties covering industrial as well as agricultural lands. The royals own dozens of grand estates paid for by the state. Everything is privately controlled yet paid for with public money.  I became a friend of Diana, had her at home for dinner many times, and attended some of her bashes at KP, (the acronym for Kensington Palace among snobby insiders). Diana was a nice person, in over her head, and treated abominably by her husband. (He trampled on the first commandment of adultery: You treat the betrayed wife with great kindness and respect.) I had the bad luck to meet Princess Margaret, described by her own hubby Tony Snowden as looking like “a Jewish manicurist.” I’d say a bit shorter than the average Jewish manicurist, but then I’m no expert in that particular field. Margaret pulled rank non-stop and was a rude, demanding, bitter and unhappy woman. Her sister the queen was dignified, cold, and kept up appearances to the last. Her husband Philip was humorous, intelligent, and the only respectable male of the bunch.  The now disgraced Andrew I met a couple of times, and he was, well, a pompous bore, uninteresting and full of himself, and without the handle up front you’d probably hand him your stub at the movie entrance. Has the vilification by the media gone too far? Absolutely. Andrew’s excuse, as far as I’m concerned, is his extreme stupidity. Being as dumb as he is, he allowed his greed to go unchecked, with the satanic Epstein and La Maxwell egging him on. The only person I know who is dumber than Andrew is his ex-wife Fergie, whom pious prigs of the gutter press used to praise to the skies, but the once ghastly suck-ups now crucify every chance they get.  Fergie and I met under strange circumstances. A now-dead Chinese tycoon, David Tang, invited me for lunch at Harry’s Bar, back then owned by a friend and the best eatery in London. Upon arrival, I noticed a couple of dukes, some society ladies, and a beaming Tang, who placed me on his right. Everything was hunky-dory until dessert time, when a flushed and apologetic Sarah, still back then Duchess of York, arrived rather flustered. I stood up, thanked Tang and made my excuses to leave.  “But the whole purpose of the lunch was for Sarah to meet you,” spluttered Tang.  “She sure took her time about it,” answered yours truly. At the time I was Atticus on the London Sunday Times, and Fergie had been caught having her toes sucked by John Brian, an American who had already taken me to the cleaners and was “advising” Sarah on her investments. I had lots of fun writing about it. Hence a rather very expensive lunch, paid for by Tang on his way to be knighted for services to broken-down royals.  The meeting was short. I told Fergie that it was nothing personal and I would try and lay off her outrageous behavior, only to justify Tang’s expensive lunch. I kept my word, and she continued to be caught non-stop in dishonest money schemes and embarrassing sexual triangles. The Epstein e-mails, however, seem to have sunk the unsinkable Fergie for good. Snobbery is far stronger in Britain as a behavior altering classification than any drug. Members of Parliament who used to grovel, bow, and scrape now are demanding Andrew’s head. Charles III is leading the mob; he has half a dozen palaces and untold billions all paid for by the state to protect. The whole place stinks, starting from the top. It took a blackmailing American pimp to bring down part of the Windsor mystique, but then Epstein also managed to ruin a naïve-about-women Larry Summers and that fool Bill Gates. I say “fool” because he keeps apologizing. What for? So he got cozy with a couple of mature Russians—so what? Is that now a no-no? (And am I the only one to have written that Epstein was a pimp and a blackmailer before he got caught?) The media that never knows anything until after the fact now paints the pimp’s life as an elitist group’s excesses. This is totally false. There was nothing elitist about Epstein and his crowd, just non-stop sleaze. The girls were underage, naïve, poor, and needy, not pretty, but quite desperate. Epstein’s houses were badly decorated with cheap furniture and very ugly and bad paintings. There was not a single beautiful object, including the females, anywhere near him. Hogarth painted very ugly people in very ugly situations. Epstein’s crowd would have been a perfect setting for good old Hogarth. The post Taki Among the Royals appeared first on The American Conservative.