The sub-primate level of conversation, as prevalent as the snow up here in the Alps, took a turn for the better last week while a select few celebrated Prince Nicolas Romanoff’s 90th birthday. Yes, most people who live up here are illiterate, but they sure know how to count, some even up to ten billion. None of the counters was present at the birthday, however, given at the yacht club by Dino Goulandris for the head of the tragic Romanoff house, just many old friends who included some of Europe’s oldest and most royal families. No camel drivers, thank you very much, no Russian oligarchs, just Former People‘Apparently they come as standard for all new builds.’
, as Douglas Smith named his heartbreaking book on the final days of the Russian aristocracy. Buy that book (it was published last year in New York by Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and weep through it.
Set in the maelstrom of the revolution (which was to prove once and for all that, when the lower elements of society prevail, the outcome is always a hundred times worse than what it replaced), this is a chilling tale of looted palaces, desperate flights, cold-blooded murder of innocents — especially women — and marauding peasants and so-called red soldiers butchering the helpless. Funny how little one reads about the cold-blooded murder of the Russian aristocracy, not that Hollywood has done much better. (There’s been a couple of bad films about Rasputin, showing the Russian prince who killed him as a drunken poof. Yusupov was homosexual but a gentleman and married to a great beauty.)
For that matter, three million German women raped by Soviet soldiers in the aftermath of the second world war hardly get a mention. Two great families who survived the 1917 holocaust were the Sheremetev and the Trubetskoy — well, survived being a relative word. A terrible picture in the book of Eli Trubetskoy, taken shortly before her death in Moscow’s Butyrki prison on 7 February 1943, shows her haggard face after years of torture and her beautiful blue eyes and aristocratic disdain for her captors as obvious as the horror around her. As luck would have it I dated two young girls very long ago named Sheremetev and Trubetskoy, Xenia in Athens, whom I still am in contact with, Sophie in Paris, who sadly committed suicide. But this is getting too depressing.
Which Nicolas Romanoff’s party certainly wasn’t. His grandchildren, one of them a real beauty, gave toasts, and Nicolas, who is very tall and handsome, responded in a strong voice without once becoming emotional. I suppose after Ekaterinburg not many things bring a lump to one’s throat. I sat with King Constantine and his sister-in-law Princess Benedikte, and the Greek King gave a very good speech, pointing out that Nicolas was the first Romanoff to reach the age of 90, just as in his family, the first ever to reach that great age is Prince Philip.
King Constantine’s story is also one of survival and accommodation, of overcoming the psychological wounds inflicted by the loss of his world, a golden period as far as I’m concerned, and if you don’t agree, all you have to do is look at the brothel that my country has become today. Without a higher authority to keep them honest, the politicians robbed the country blind, then stole all the EU money the thieves in Brussels were sending them to prepare the country’s infrastructure as a German outback.
Just for starters: the 2011 finance minister and present leader of the socialist party, Evangelos Venizelos (a famous name this bum adopted as his own), is a fat slob who is responsible for the law granting broad immunity to government ministers. Namely many of the crooks. It’s like trying to clean up Chicago without touching Al Capone and his gang. But Venizelos is the darling of the EU mandarins. That sun-tanned Christine
Lagarde slipped Venizelos a list of 2,000 Greeks with a Swiss bank account, a Javert-like gesture of denouncing people, most of whom had every right to have a Swiss bank account. (No, I am not on the list.) Now there are midnight knocks on totally innocent people’s houses while the greatest crooks of all sit on their fat asses in parliament enjoying their immunity. This is not a country, it’s more like a circus, and a flea circus at that. (Lagarde is a typical EU leech, winking and slipping lists on the quiet; she would have been perfect in the Stalinist system.)
Greece is beyond help because the same old crooked system and the same old crooks are at the helm. Take the King’s case, for example. The state expropriated his land and houses and its contents, all three bought and paid for by his great-grandfather, George I, who insisted on separating his private properties from those of the state. The King went to Strasbourg as a court of last resort, and guess what the EU crooks gave him? Less than one hundredth of what the properties were worth. (They were valued at close to $600 million, and the Ali Babas in Strasbourg offered 12 million. The King gave that away to Greek charities.) So now all those valuable lands and houses have been taken over by the crooks, a perfect ending to a perfect crime, one Brussels was in cahoots with. So try to keep that in mind next time someone makes fun of Ukip. Unless you vote Ukip, your house may one day go to someone in Brussels or Strasbourg, especially if you’re royal.
Spare a thought for Chris Coghlan, who has learned to his horror that not only is the Pope a Catholic, his own priest is one too. The Liberal Democrat MP, who voted to legalise assisted suicide, attends St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Dorking. He complains to the Observer that Father Ian Vane ‘publicly announced at Mass that he was… denying me
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