Child abuse in the royal family

Give us a boy, say the Jesuits, and we’ll give you a man. Give me a boy, says Princess Eugenie, Prince Andrew’s little girl, and I’ll give you an eco-fanatic.

The boy in question is her son August, who turns two in a few days. That’s the cut-off point, beyond which the poor boy’s indoctrination is planned to start.

The Princess, aka Mrs Jack Brooksbank, has it all mapped out: “My son’s going to be an activist from two years old, which is in a couple of days. So, he, everything is for them.” Nicely put – I especially like the second sentence.

Such ideas make one think. And this is the thought that flashed across my mind: God save us from people with weak minds and strong ideas.

What a pity that the concept of child abuse comprises only violent or sexual transgressions against a child’s body. A child’s mind, implies the law, is off limits for abuse. When the parents do to the mind what perverts do to the body, that’s nobody’s business.

Eugenie went to the same public school, and at the same time, as my beloved niece, who also came out at the other end with all sorts of deep concerns about ‘our planet’. If that’s what expensive education delivers, give me a bog standard comprehensive any day.

The princess shared those views with the dyed-in-wool sharks at the World Economic Forum in Davos. I’m sure they all toss and turn through the night, having nightmares about our planet reduced to red-hot wasteland by aerosol sprays and plastic bags.

To give Eugenie justice, she didn’t claim to have arrived at her desire to abuse her son by any cerebral route. The decision, according to her, was purely hormonal:

“Every decision we now make has to be for whether August, what he’s going to be able to look at and do and how he’s going to live his life. But I think also as a mother, you all of a sudden, totally you change, your hormones change, everything changes.”

It’s that expensive education again, which evidently doesn’t impart an ability to put together a coherent sentence, never mind a sound thought. Eugenie then added that post-natal hormonal changes also gave her a fear of flying, which is about as rational as her fear of global warming.

She also said they had nothing plastic at home, which is unlikely. What, not even credit cards? Also, does she drive a car? Or is driven in one? In that case, an average sedan has about 100 lbs of plastic materials in its body. That’s a lot of shopping bags and mineral water bottles.

Since Eugenie clearly doesn’t read serious books, she must surf the net in search of information about our dying environment. What does she think her computer is made of? Solid gold? Sugar and spice? Mine is mostly plastic, and I bet so is hers.

That public school of hers must have left not only English but also logic off the curriculum. Otherwise its alumna wouldn’t be mouthing utter gibberish, such as: “I’d rather be that way, but sometimes the facts and the figures and sometimes having the dinners do give you that sort of sense of frustration and doom and gloom.”

Whatever that sentence means, it evades me. Neither do I detect any sensible causal relationship in the link Eugenie’s found between global warming and slavery:

“Modern slavery and human trafficking is a really big issue across the globe. There are 49 million people estimated in slavery today and we know that when the climate is vulnerable, the most vulnerable people are affected by it.”

Let’s see if I get it right. Using aerosol sprays, driving cars and carrying groceries in plastic bags directly leads to more people being enslaved. If there is a point there, it’s lost on me. But then I went to a free school where most boys carried knives in their pockets.

I do suggest that Eugenie go back to her plastic computer and read up on the history of both slavery and climate. She may find that slavery is a more or less constant fact of life, whereas global temperatures, if you look at them over millennia, not just last week, go up and down. In fact, for about 80 per cent of the Earth’s lifetime, they have been higher than they are now. 

Eugenie credits her heightened awareness not only to her dancing hormones, but also to her Mummy and Daddy: “I have always loved being in nature. My parents instilled in me a love of wild places and a respect for animals and the natural world.”

If half the things one reads about Andrew and Fergie are true, then they would have been more likely to instil in little Eugenie a love of wild parties, not wild places. But they, like the moon, must have another side never revealed to earthlings.

I pity poor August. He already got a bad start in life by being given a weird name – that is, unless the princess wished to remind the public of her family’s German origins. In German, that name has lost its original Latin ending. But it has kept it in English, where the name normally comes across as Augustus.

When he goes to his own expensive school, other boys will tease him no end (I’m assuming, or rather hoping, that our best – well, most expensive – schools won’t have gone co-ed by then). And he’ll already have his head pumped full of woke rubbish, which, if Eugenie is to be taken at her word, he’ll try to preach to all and sundry.

I do hope that as a result poor August won’t find himself on the receiving end of physical violence. As he is already finding himself on the receiving end of mental abuse.