Ah well…another year comes quietly to its end, and we look forward to the next, in this case 2023. After all, not much has happened, has it…?

So much has in fact happened this year that it is difficult to know exactly where to begin. We continue to feel the rumblings of two major events to affect the United Kingdom: the global COVID-19 pandemic, which still seems very far from being declared “over,” and the 2016 “Brexit” referendum, in which the people of the UK voted by a massive majority of 1.8% to leave the European Union.

The Commonwealth, headed by the United Kingdom and including Canada, Australia and New Zealand and many others, suffered a seismic event when it lost its head of state, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022). She had, just three months earlier, celebrated her Platinum jubilee, her seventy years on the throne constituting an all-time record for a British monarch. Furthermore, just two days before her death, she had welcomed a new prime minister, Liz Truss, of whom more later.

But the death of the Queen on 8 September set in motion a sequence of events that, we are told, only one in four of us were old enough to remember previously, in 1952. In other words, three quarters of us here in the UK cannot remember anyone other than Queen Elizabeth II as our head of state. Indeed, when her husband, Prince Philip, died in April 2021 just two months before his 100th birthday, it seemed very unlikely that, after a loving marriage of 73 years, she would outlive him by very long, and so it proved.

When King Charles III ascended the throne, he almost immediately appeared on television to make his first address to the nation. In it, he said that he would continue his late mother’s role as head of the Church of England, while at the same time being a divorcee married to a divorcee, and a non-royal divorcee at that. The last time that happened, in 1936, King Edward VIII was forced to choose between his wife and his country (though Edward himself was not a divorcé. He chose his wife, and abdicated on December 11 that year. That was the year of the Three Kings, and it is ironic that King Charles should take on the monarchy in the Year of the Three Prime Ministers, of whom more later.

King Charles III is the first divorced British (or English) monarch since Henry VIII. Further irony for Charles is that Henry set up the Church of England, a protestant religion, in order for him to obtain that divorce, from Catherine of Aragon in 1533. Yet, as a rule, except in very special circumstances, the Church did not marry divorcées. That is, until 2002. Have a look at the form, which details the entire sorry rigmarole that you need to go through in order to remarry in church, here: https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-11/MarriageAFTERdivorceFORM.pdf

When Prince Charles, as he was then, married the former Camilla Parker-Bowles on 9 April 2005, it’s worth noting that his beloved grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and who would likely have been opposed to such a marriage, had died in 2002, and also that his mother the Queen gave her permission for his marriage to the Privy Council. As Head of The C of E, she could (and should, in the eyes of some) have blocked the wedding, which would have made things very difficult constitutionally.

Further irony is heaped on the situation because Charles and Camilla elected not to be wed in church at all, but in a civil ceremony at the Civic Hall in Windsor. This meant that the groom’s parents, Queen Elizabeth II and her consort Prince Philip, did not attend their own son’s wedding (although they did attend the blessing service held later and the reception at Windsor Castle).

What’s all this for? Oh yes, to make the point that, despite our own (as a human race, that is) decision that our Royal Family are somehow born better than the rest of us, they are, to all intents and purposes, just like us. They get divorced just like us. They want to stop working and move to California just like us. They want to get involved with child sex traffickers just like us.

King Charles’ brother Andrew’s involvement and friendship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is at the same time puzzling and dangerous. Also pretty stupid was his decision to try to justify this friendship in a car-crash television interview with Emily Maitlis in 2019. So stupid was this interview that it, and the circumstances around it, are being made into a movie! What??? No!!! I sit corrected – it’s being made into two movies!

Maitlis herself is producing a movie based on her interview with Andrew, as is her former boss at the BBC, Sam McAllister. Whether either of these two movies turns out to be any good remains to be seen, but it proves one thing: that Andrew’s decision to try and justify his friendship with Epstein in order to try and save himself was simply crazy; just plain stupid.

Many body language experts have ripped this interview apart and proved that Andrew was, for the most part, either lying or offering excuses (allegedly) for certain events and timelines that were utterly unbelievable (allegedly). He could not have had sex with Virginia Giuffre, then Virginia Roberts aged 17, on the night she claimed because he remembered he was at Pizza Express in Woking celebrating his daughter Beatrice’s birthday (allegedly).

After from a break of about a month or so during which Andrew, and his brother Charles, were allowed to grieve the death of their mother the Queen, the new King Charles has let his brother know in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t believe a word of it and he is going to have to face the music for what he has done (allegedly). This could mean that Andrew will be stripped of his royal titles, his royal privileges, and most importantly of all, his royal salary, paid for by the taxpayer, and the one he is reluctant to relinquish most of all. We have yet to see.

But King Charles does not only have to contend with that royal headache. His youngest son Harry’s marriage to an American actress, herself a divorcée, and subsequent withdrawal from royal duties has led to accusations of maltreatment of him and his wife by other members of the royal family, including and perhaps especially his father King Charles, and his brother, the new Prince of Wales and future monarch, Prince William. More dangerously than that, however, Harry’s marriage has also led to accusations of racism within the ranks of the Royal Family.

Though hitherto unnamed, a particular member of the Family expressed concern that Harry’s two children with the former Meghan Markle were black. Mrs Mountbatten-Windsor does not seem to have hit it off either with Harry’s family or the British public. Being a former actress, it was natural that she should base herself in or near the city of Los Angeles, the place where dreams are made. And Harry, desperate to prove to his brother that his marriage was as strong as William and Kate’s, has followed Markle wherever she goes. He has withdrawn from royal life so that he can make his own money by writing books and making documentaries in which he can sling muck at his family and royal colleagues. It has been suggested that Harry is jealous of William’s automatic future accession to the throne by the simple virtue of his being the older sibling, despite the fact that that has been the procedure in this and every other royal household since the beginning of recorded history. He, too, recorded a car-crash interview, this time with Oprah Winfrey, and with his wife alongside him, and they also made a six-hour documentary series for Netflix in which they promised to reveal everything (allegedly) and revealed nothing (allegedly).

In among all of this, the Queen decided that she had had enough and lost her battle with breathing on 8 September 2022. She had already become the first monarch in English (or British) history to reach her Platinum jubilee. That’s 70 years, folks, which makes it highly unlikely to be repeated within the next century at least! Nobody currently living on this Earth now is likely to experience another such jubilee. Unless something disastrous happens, of course.

Just 48 hours before she died, Queen Elizabeth, known affectionately among her subjects as Liz, welcomed another Liz – this time Liz Truss, newly-installed by Conservative Party members as their leader, and by default Prime Minister. Truss got the job because her predecessor, Boris Johnson, had been forced to resign after he and members of his party had broken laws that they themselves put in place to stop the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic – which, as I mentioned earlier, is still ongoing at the time of writing. I mean, bloody hell. Johnson, and other ministers, received a Fixed Penalty Notice (basically, a fine and a telling-off) (allegedly), but that wasn’t enough. Johnson had to go.

The final two candidates were Liz Truss and former Chancellor Rishi Sunak. For some bizarre reason best known to themselves, party members chose Truss over Sunak, something that displeased Tory MPs greatly; they resolved to do something about it. Thankfully, at least from the Tory perspective, they didn’t have to do anything at all. Truss, and her new Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, did it for themselves.

Almost immediately upon taking office, Truss and Kwarteng decided to stamp their authority on proceedings by introducing what was referred to by the media as a “mini-budget.” Firstly, in order to generate a small amount of income, the basic rate of income tax was reduced from 20 to 19%. This extra money, however, and a lot more besides, was pissed away when Kwarteng decided to abolish the higher rate of income tax in England, then set at 45%. “Wow!” said the rich, “thank you very much!” “Uh-oh,” said Everybody Else, “you’re fired.”

The Stock Market reacted violently to this decision and began to fall sharply, as did the value of the pound, cheesing off the population of Great Britain and Northern Ireland something rotten. Members of Parliament, who would have benefitted from this tax cut, also reacted sharply and called for Truss and Kwarteng to reverse this policy, but the two leaders of the financial market stood their ground and refused to budge.

This was an ill-advised decision. To try and save her own skin, Truss sacked Kwarteng on 14 October, making him the shortest-serving Chancellor in history. Worse was to come. Truss’ reputation, never on solid ground in the first place, finally crumbled and she resigned on 20 October. This essentially paved the way for Rishi Sunak to take the job, albeit through another leadership election.

What’s surprising – nay, amazing – is that all of this took place without a General Election and a change of government, which Labour leader Sir Kier Starmer and his party were calling for, because they knew that they were so far ahead in the opinion polls that they would have trounced the Tories if such an election had taken place.

So, the Tories were third in the popular opinion polls, they (and we) have had three prime ministers in 2022. One journalist pointed out that it took twenty-eight years to get through three prime ministers after Margaret Thatcher’s first election win in 1979.

Royalty, politicians…they’re just like us, you know. Despite our voluntary decision to hold these people aloft and consider them from a higher plane than the rest of us, they’re just like us, except – purely through virtue of birth – they get to enjoy privileges that none of us will ever see. But, thanks to the media and its influence on popular opinion, they are also held accountable when they think they can get away with stuff that would finish our careers in the Real World. But now politicians, and even royalty, are staring down the barrel of the gun that popular opinion is directing right at them. Not that I approve of gun violence of any sort; and besides, the gun probably isn’t loaded anyway. The status quo has been maintained.

Happy Christmas. Let us hope that 2023 brings us some joy instead of the predicted turmoil of sickness, strikes, royal and political shenanigans, not to mention a deeper cost of living crisis of which there seems to be no end. Let us hope for a miracle and all of these causes for hopelessness will be turned around. x