Over the weekend, the Daily Mirror published their big exclusive: Queen Camilla on a yacht in Greek waters, having gone on a summer vacation far away from her husband. King Charles has been in Scotland for more than a week, doing public events and visiting the Castle of Mey. Camilla has been sunning herself on a yacht which belongs to a Tory donor and Syrian with extensive business relationships in Saudi Arabia. As Tom Sykes’ new Royalist Substack points out, it gets even worse: Camilla was on the yacht with her children and grandchildren.
If Queen Elizabeth II were still with us, one suspects she would be surveying photographs published this weekend of her daughter-in-law aboard a billionaire Tory donor’s £30 million ($38 million) superyacht in the Aegean with an expression of flinty disapproval. The late monarch prided herself on never taking a bean from anyone, never accepting freebies, and considered a summer holiday to mean Scotland, not Santorini. She believed, to her bones, that Charles’s taste for grandeur sent the wrong message.
And yet, as a remarkable scoop by the Mirror revealed, here is Queen Camilla, wafting from one of Greece’s most exclusive bays to another on a Monaco-registered floating palace, in full view of the world, during a cost-of-living crisis, on the dime of one of the Conservative Party’s most lavish benefactors. Oh, and her family came along for the ride, its owner revealed.
The constitutional problem is obvious: the monarchy’s survival depends on political neutrality. The Royal Family’s own website stresses that “while The King is the Head of State, he remains politically impartial” and the rest of the family follows the same principle. That is, quite simply, the very basis of the Crown’s legitimacy. Accepting hospitality from Wafic Saïd, an 85-year-old Syrian-Saudi billionaire and former Tory mega-donor who brokered the controversial Al-Yamamah arms deal in the 1980s for the Thatcher government, blatantly flouts not just the spirit but the written rules of that neutrality. It is also, more importantly, exquisitely tone-deaf.
The yacht’s owner, far from downplaying the connection, arguably made it worse in comments to the Mirror, saying: “The Parker-Bowles family have been close friends of mine for over 40 years. Tom Parker-Bowles was at school with my son, and Tom and Laura are like children to me…. It is natural for me to offer my boat to close friends when I am not using it. I was therefore pleased to offer it to the family and glad to learn she is enjoying time with her children and grandchildren.”
As Sykes points out further in this piece, it’s very likely that Camilla believed that no one would know, and/or that Buckingham Palace would be able to control the story and muzzle the British press. It seems the palace has been working to put out this fire, because few outlets picked up the Mirror’s exclusive. Sykes actually pointed out the double-standard in what the British press obsesses over: “Humor me and conduct a thought experiment: imagine the scathing coverage if Meghan had been photographed on this massive political donor’s yacht with her kids.” Exactly.
Anyway, the point is that Camilla’s yacht jaunt was bad news in like ten different ways. I’m shocked that she would so openly vacation away from her husband, and I’m shocked that no one seemingly told Camilla that she should not take this particular vacation at this particular time. It’s also bonkers to me that Camilla is seemingly bored with the multiple palaces, castles, mansions and lodges at her disposal. Like, all of that real estate, all of those homes, and you still need to “relax” on a yacht?
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images, cover courtesy of the Mirror.
