by Maeve Binchy
And are they right? Maybe they are the people who should have the funds instead of a crowd of amateurs with big notions and no talent.
But this is a problem that has never been solved. Should there be hoteliers on the board of Bórd Fáilte, or even as its chairmen? Wouldn’t that mean an unfair advantage for that person’s hotels? But then, if you have people who don’t know one end of a hotel from another, isn’t that equally cracked?
Bórd Fáilte didn’t break up in disarray; the problem was addressed in a different way. But the really stupid thing would have been to have had no Bórd Fáilte, no tourist office to let people know about our land.
Michael D Higgins always says that he prides himself on doing things quickly. I’m sure he’ll do this one very quickly altogether. I bet we’ll all be reading and disagreeing with his choice on Monday morning over breakfast.
(Michael D proved very amenable to suggestions and moved at the speed of fast forward, and as a result Bórd Scannáin na hEireann is one of the great success stories of our times. Financial investment in Irish films in 1993 and 1994 soared to £29 million, compared to £11.5 million in the previous six years, and at the last count 30 films were either completed, underway or on schedule for those two years.)
Gamblers Anonymous
“People thought the Names were like benevolent despots who left their money there in case the Titanic sank again”
So there are over 300 Irish Names in Lloyds. And they may be in financial difficulty. Why is it so hard to be sympathetic? I mean, you’d be a little sorry for some halfwit who lost his salary on a horse that was not as fleet of foot as had been hoped. You’d have a bit of pity for the fools flung over machines in Las Vegas, and the card-players with dulled eyes trying to fill a straight yet again. Why is it hard to feel anything for the Names?
Possibly because, with a few exceptions, they are not Names at all; they are Anons. There was a meeting of Irish Names a while back, and they were all rushing out of the door of the hotel with newspapers over their heads and their faces stuck under the armpits of their coats in case anyone would know who they were. Lord Mountcharles, Lord Killanin and Dr Edmond O’Flaherty have always “outed” themselves about being Names and it was assumed that most Irish business people, who can lay their hands easily on a quarter of a million so that they can afford to “sort of let it lie there”, are in Lloyds. But it was as secret as the Masons and the Knights, with an added aura of incredible financial rectitude.
A Name was a person who Kept Things Going. And they did very nicely out of it. The point about being a Name was that you had to tell Lloyds you had £250,000 which they could call on if needs be.
You had to do more than tell them, I imagine – I think you had to show it to them.
But the great advantage was you didn’t have to give it to them: you could invest it in something else and every year you got your interest on that investment. And, because Lloyds knew that your money was always there to call on if ever they needed it, they paid you as well. Around 10 per cent. So it worked out that you got about £25,000 a year from them as well as what you got from your deposit account or whatever it was.
It was nice work being a Name. It was, of course, perfectly legal. More than legal: people thought that Names were like benevolent despots who left their money there in case the Titanic sank again.
And, as the years went on, the Names must have been excused for thinking that this was money for old rope – every year the interest came in on their investments as usual, and every year there was the nice little earner from Lloyds. And I am absolutely certain that many Names did very good things with their money: I don’t see them all as bad barons twirling their moustaches and grinding the poor ever further into the ground.
But if a Name had two brain cells to rub together then, somewhere along the line, it must have crossed his happy mind that there was some risk involved in this.
Ever since the confused aristocracy babbled their way to the guillotine, there can’t have been anyone who believed that there was some kind of system which allowed the rich to get richer with no risk until the end of time. They must have said, even in the privacy of the boudoir, that this caper was too good to be true. Surely a cliché about the bubble being bound to burst might have slid into the subconscious?
But I have never known such bellyaching among Names, and Friends of Names. There are accusations of Insider Trading, Double Dealing, People in the Know, a Golden Circle which steered newcomers into dangerous areas and let them become involved in potential powder kegs – such as the US environmental lobby and all the upcoming claims because of asbestos policies.
If there is an Inner Circle, and it has been in no way proved . . . so what? You don’t hear anyone being outraged on behalf of the eejit who lost his money because he hadn’t as much info about the state of mind and the state of fetlock of some horse. The only thing I see to praise in those who gamble heavily at the races and the card tables is that they know they are gambling.
What kind of brain-fade made the Names unaware of this?
People who suspect that horses are held back and that decks are rigged still put their money at risk. Those who know that the bank must win in a casino still lay their counters on the red and the black. Anyone with stocks and shares knows they can go up or down.
Why did the Names stand alone in the commercial world and not understand that some day this capital they had pledged might be called in? Lloyds is very old-fashioned; therein lay a lot of its charm. It’s full of ponderous old-chap tradition, and manages to preserve, amid the new architecture and high technology of the City of London, a sort of superior let’s-not-be-vulgar-and-talk-about-trade-and-money-or-anything-sordid atmosphere.
It’s nearly 200 years since a ship wrecked on the Zuider Zee; it was called HMS Lutine. Everyone in Lloyds was nearly wiped out over that one, and the sum was half a million. Years later they found its plunder and made it into a chair for Lloyds’ Chairmen, and they hung up its bell – which was rung once when a shipwreck was reported and rung twice when a ship was overdue. That was fairly mind-blowing as well.
Last week in a restaurant in Dublin, I heard a group of diners sympathising with a Name. You would have thought that he been made redundant through no fault of own. You would have believed that his hard-worked-for earnings had been abstracted by a crooked accountant. You would have thought that a conman had sold him a property that did not exist.
But no, all that had happened to him was that he had gambled. And the Lutine bell began ringing for almost £3 billion. And he had to pay his share.
I was longing to tell them not to cry for him. That other people have had to move to smaller houses and live a very different lifestyle. But I wouldn’t interrupt their dinner. And anyway, I could tell them today.
(Some Names have banded together and are taking all kinds of legal action in the British courts alleging malpractice, negligence and other dire practices on the part of the enterprises they were persuaded to underwrite. Other Names have just gone down the tubes. Lloyds of London is still going strong. The chaps wouldn’t let a bit of unpleasantness set the old institution back.)
Queen’s Move
“Unlike the rest of the team . . . she gives good value for her civil list payment”
If I were an old friend of the Queen Mother I would come and have a nice gin with her this weekend and suggest quite seriously that she take over the throne.
Her daughter, the present Queen of England, is having a bad time: she has begun to talk in Latin, she is aching to retire and can’t because all her children have gone off the rails and the grandchildren are too young.
Who would be a more suitable person to put on the throne than her mother? The only Royal not to have been toppled from the pedestals of yesteryear, the only one who knows that the main qualification for being a Royal at all is to smile constantly and pretend you are having a great time everywhere.
There is another advantage about the Queen Mother taking over. At the age of 9
4, her life-expectancy would not be enormous and even the most dedicated anti-monarchist could hardly object to her serving her term.
And then, in the fullness of time when she is about 100, and the new millennium dawns, the monarchy could come to a gracious and logical end without any revolution, and there could be a glut of nostalgic books about how wonderful they all were in their time.
The Queen Mother has a nice soothing aura about her. I have seen her at the races presenting cups and talking to trainers and discussing the water jump with jockeys as if she might be saddling up herself a bit later in the afternoon. The older she gets, the more pastel her clothes become and the more feathers and fringes appear in her hats. She is like a marvellous mad bird of paradise in any crowd, her hand raised in automatic wave position, her smile wider and wider, her corgis growling contentedly at her feet, and a look of great regret when she has to leave whatever housing estate, memorial ceremony, shipyard or sports event that they have wheeled her out to that day. Unlike the rest of the team – who seem to be pawing at the ground, looking over their shoulders and sighing – she gives good value for her civil list payment.
She is a loved old-fashioned relic of a time gone by. And so, in many ways, is the monarchy itself. If they were united in one person, it would be a spectacular way to draw it all to a close.
Look at all the crises that would be solved at one swoop. The present Queen, who seems to have a very sincere sense of duty about the whole thing, would feel secure if she let her mother take over. It would end all this angst about whether Di can be crowned or not, or whether it should skip Charles and go to the little prince. You get the feeling that she is hanging on in there until the little prince becomes a big enough prince to take over.
But if she were to look not to far-distant generations but instead look back one, she has the perfect candidate waiting in the wings.
Presumably the Queen Mother wouldn’t be having embarrassing conversations on mobile phones. She wouldn’t give rise to endless speculation like the next lot down the line do, making the British public ask seriously in pubs and in acres of print: Are They Worth It? or Is Their Day Over?
If the Queen Mother were to be crowned with the tacit – or maybe even formal – agreement that she were to be the last of the line, then it would mean that Charles could marry Camilla, which he really should do fairly smartish anyway. Not just because it’s the only honourable and gentlemanly sort of thing to do if a lady’s name has been mentioned and rather more than mentioned, but because Camilla is taking on all the appearances of a very loose cannon indeed on the deck. I have seen photographs of her glaring at things in general that would unhinge me if I were Charles. And if one’s grandmother were safely crowned and anointed and there were no question of one having to stand in readiness for it, one could get on with doing The Right Thing.
And those little boys could have a normal life if they didn’t have to think about shouldering responsibilities and taking over a job that Daddy should have done and didn’t, and in general having to sort out the mess that Mummy and Daddy and all the silly uncles and aunties got them into. What a huge relief to them it would be to see Great-Grandmother smiling away with a crown on over her hat, and Grandma looking happy out with her corgis in the rain while Grandfather growled and shot small birds all day. The whole scheme has so much to recommend it the Queen Mother would be surprised that she hadn’t thought of it before.
But – and it’s always wise, when giving advice, to anticipate the argument – but, she might say, perhaps it would be an imposition, maybe they mightn’t like an elderly relative moving in on them all and taking things over?
This is where I would lean over confidentially and say: So what?
They all purport to take this monarchy business seriously but the Queen Mother is the only one who actually went out and worked at it. She was never expecting it; the others were born to it or married into it or discovered that they were stuck with it at an early age. But the Queen Mother thought she was marrying a nice younger son, a duke certainly, but had not a notion of his turning into a king until all that Bad Behaviour back in the 1930s when Edward went off course.
And she stuck to it all, helping a nervous man with a speech impediment make broadcasts to the nation – which frightened him to death – and she was always there smiling through air raids and more and more impossible weddings. They even brought her to Scotland to give a bit of respectability to Anne’s second wedding and what thanks does she get for it?
None at all.
Normally I wouldn’t inflame a friend against the family, I see my role more as soother of ruffled feelings and patter-down of possible rows.
But honestly. The woman is 93. She choked and was taken to hospital. You couldn’t get into the place with all the flowers from well-wishers. But did her family come to see her? No, they did not.
She has two daughters, six grandchildren. And for three days the news bulletins of the BBC led with a health report on her. And then it dawned on some clouded PR brain that common people go to see their relatives in hospital and the Duke of York was rustled up for a photocall.
I’d say to the Queen Mother, don’t waste any time worrying about their sensitivities, they seem to have lost them.
And then we would plan what we’d both wear for the Coronation.
Road to Rome
“The whole dangerous business of bells and smells”
When Katherine Worseley married the Duke of Kent in 1961, she was a nice ladylike girl from an upper-class family in Yorkshire and there was a sigh of relief because she was good-looking, quiet and she wasn’t a Catholic.
That was over 30 years ago when a great many real people still thought it was terribly important that the monarchy shouldn’t be tied to Rome’s apron strings with overtones of Armadas and Counter-Reformations, and the whole dangerous business of bells and smells. Life was complicated then for royalists, because the tragic fact was that the only suitable spouses for the Windsors and their cousins seemed to be – perish the thought – Catholic monarchies. There were dozens of likely starters in the crumbling palaces of Europe, whose lineage was fine and royal but who dug with the wrong foot.
Nowadays surely it couldn’t matter less, or so you might think. Normal people would be forgiven for thinking that the British royal family has given such unwilling entertainment over the last few years, in so many spheres, that the mere conversion to Catholicism of a woman who is married to someone 18th in line to the throne should pass without comment. But they would be wrong. It has been analysed and argued down to the bone: it has been made into a drama, a threat, a straw in the wind. They say it has all to do with the Church of England’s confusion over the ordination of women priests. They say the floodgates are about to open and that hordes of upper-crust Anglicans are about to defect. They don’t see a tired, pleasant, quiet woman who obviously seriously thinks that her way to God is clearer and more satisfying through membership of the Catholic Church. They have turned the whole thing into a circus.
I have great sympathy for the Duchess of Kent. With over half her lifetime lived in a goldfish bowl, she couldn’t even have a miscarriage or a depression in private. When she agreed to be a patron of the Samaritans, she also wanted to work with them as a sympathetic listening voice on the phone. But then, when it leaked out that Samaritan Katie was really her Royal Highness, it changed everything. She was in the limelight when her son married what was thought to be an unsuitable bride. Canadian, Catholic, divorced. Then her other son was caught with a teeny bit of cannabis – the first royal drugs bust. Everything she did, or her family did, was a matter for public attention.
The tabloids said alternately that she was caring or unstable, depending on how they felt about her. She felt human sympathy and sorrow for the Czech tennis player, Jana Novotna, who burst into tears in front of everyone at Wimbledon. She hugged the girl with the kind of response that most of us would think was good, rather than staring frostily past her and pretending it
wasn’t happening, like many other royals would have done. But the tabloids blew it all up to the skies; either she was as caring as Mother Teresa, a totally inappropriate comparison, or she was definitely unstable, her own tears never being far from the surface. At least Katherine Worseley’s husband, who is Grand Master of Britain’s Freemasons, would have the huge advantage of secrecy on his side.
She was always a religious Anglican and, as many felt before her, she must have felt that she could take a further step and moved from her high church practice of the Protestant faith to joining the Church of Rome. At the same time as she was making that decision, there were also Catholics who left the Church of Rome because they disapproved of some Papal teachings. All these are people of good faith and honour, following their consciences. All over the world, people are finding personal roads to Damascus, seeing salvation, seeing a better way to live or a hope and a promise by taking a different route. In general, people wish them well and they get on with it. But then they are not duchesses. Katherine Worseley isn’t allowed to get on with it.
Among the upper-class Catholics in England there is a triumphalism that is as irritating as the frightened braying of those who regard the conversion as a defection. The Brompton Oratory set, the Farm Street set, the Saint Ethelreda or Hatton Garden set all hope that the Duchess will be part of their lot.
All the various Catholic charities are clamouring to have her name on their notepaper; there is a feeling of having arrived, being accepted, given a belated pat on the back for being part of a tribe once in the wilderness but now acceptable to royal duchesses. Not one bit of this is the Duchess of Kent’s fault. She was quiet and unobtrusive about it all. She asked Queen Elizabeth’s permission quietly in advance because she didn’t want the Niagara Falls of a reaction if she did it off her own bat. She couldn’t become a secret Catholic; that’s not how to do things if she had the courage and the faith to want to join openly. The early Christians, who hid their faith rather than be eaten by lions, weren’t considered much of an advertisement for their religion. But it has become a huge political football. People are very busy attributing motives to her that she may never have had. It’s her anti-abortion stance that made her take the final leap, they say. It’s a protest about the way society in general, and the royal family in particular, have been behaving. It’s giving Queen Elizabeth the opportunity to show how private faith and the established Church of England do not have to go hand in hand. It’s part of the slow process to disestablish the Church of England and allow Charles, as a divorced man, to be crowned king.