London Riot: The Royal Car.

On December 9th there was a large riot in London as the British Parliament voted through plans to increase university tuition fees. Due to some strange policing decisions the Royal car carrying Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall was caught up in the riot and attacked by protesters. Apart from the attempt to steer the domestic debate over policing tactics that has already been mentioned the purpose of this royal misfortune was to sabotage the COP16 climate change summit by drawing delegates into a complicated debate about the state of the British Monarchy.

To understand how this was meant to work you first need to know a couple of things about the British Monarchy. This first is that they're all mental. The second lesson is that the current Monarch is Queen Elizabeth the Second. She inherited the job when her father, King George the Sixth died in 1952. With her husband, Prince Phillip, Queen Elizabeth had three sons, Charles Andrew and Edward. When Queen Elizabeth dies her eldest son, Charles will become the Monarch and be known as King George the Seventh*. With his first wife, Princess Diana, Charles had two sons, William and Henry (Harry). When King George the Seventh dies his eldest son, Prince William will become King. Prince William has recently announced that he is going to marry his long term girlfriend, Kate Middleton, in April 2011 when she will become Princess Katherine.

The problem is that even before he married Princess Diana Prince Charles was having an affair with a married woman, Camilla Parker-Bowles. This affair carried on throughout Charles and Diana's unhappy marriage and eventually ended it when Charles divorced Diana in order to marry a newly divorced Camilla. Apart from causing a huge constitutional problem because the British Monarch is also the head of the Church of England which, at the time, opposed divorce and especially re-marriage the scandal did huge damage to the public reputation of the Royal family with them being viewed as evil bullies who ruined the life of the young, innocent Princess Diana. This got much worse after Princess Diana died an untimely death in a car accident in 1997. There are to this day persistent conspiracy theories that Prince Phillip ordered Diana's assassination in order to stop her embarrassing the Royal family further.

In Royalist circles a lot of people blame Camilla for the way that Diana was treated and there is some doubt whether they would ever tolerate her becoming Queen. So by driving Camilla into a riot where she was allegedly assaulted by protesters the Royal Family was trying to boost it's popularity with their core supporters by showing that they too were prepared to give Camilla a, quite literally, rough ride. Of course the real reason for the Royal families current animosity towards Camilla is that she described the announcement of Prince Williams engagement as "wicked." Now this could have been an older lady trying to sound like she was down with the kids by using street slang that's been out of date for about 20 years. Alternatively is could be someone who has gone through the trauma of marrying into the Royal family and their spiteful ways describing the decision to force Prince William into marriage in order to distract the British public from the current economic and political turmoil in the country as morally bad or evil.

So that's the British Royal Family then. They're not actually reptiles but you can seen how some people got confused.



*Britain's actually had two King Charles'. Both were beheaded so apparently the title is considered bad luck.