Royal family

Thursday

The Spectator

Could you afford to take a job with the royal family?

Royally paid Staff at Windsor Castle were balloted in strike action over pay. What can you earn in the royal household, according to adverts on the British Monarchy website? — Housekeeping assistant: £14,500 pa. Duties include ‘preparing rooms and cleaning upholstery’. Meals are provided, as is accommodation ‘for which there is a straight salary adjustment’. — Telephone operator in Privy Purse and Treasurer’s Office: £20,500. 38 hours per week. Includes some bank holiday and weekend working. — Ticket sales and information assistant for the summer opening of the Royal Collection: £8.80 per hour. Contract includes a minimum of 300 hours between June and September. Suicide watch French and German police

Thursday

The Spectator

How (not) to poison a dog

Deadly to dogs An Irish setter was allegedly poisoned at Crufts, using beef containing slug pellets. Some other substances with which dog-show rivals could poison your pooch: — Chocolate contains theobromine, a stimulant which dogs cannot metabolise, and which causes the heart to race. It takes just 1 oz per pound of body weight of milk chocolate and a third of an ounce per pound of body weight of dark chocolate to kill a dog. — Grapes and raisins can cause kidney failure in two thirds of dogs. The link was discovered by America’s Animal Poison Control Center in 2004 after the fruit was linked to the deaths of 140 animals in one year,

Thursday

The Spectator

Revealed: five British royals who definitely slept with underage girls

Teen queens The Duke of York denied allegations in court papers that he had had sexual relations with a girl in Florida aged 17, below the age of consent there. Some of his ancestors who might now be in trouble: — King John, who married Isabella of Angoulême in 1200 when she was 12. — Henry VI, who married Margaret of Anjou in 1445 when she was 15. — James I, who married Anne of Denmark in 1589 when she was 14. — Charles I, who married Henrietta Maria of France in 1624 when she was 15. — William III, who married his cousin Mary in 1677 when she was

Thursday

The Spectator

When a cricket ball cost Britain an heir to the throne

A fatal shot The sad death of Australian batsman Philip Hughes was a reminder that a cricket ball can kill. A blow on the cricket field may even have cost us an heir to the throne. — One of the earliest suspected victims was Frederick, Prince of Wales, the son of George II, who is first recorded as having played cricket in 1733 when he put up a team against Sir William Gage, in a match played on Mouley Hurst, Surrey. — In 1751, a few weeks after his 44th birthday, he was said to be suffering from an abscess in the chest caused by a blow by a cricket

Thursday

Peter Mckay

Peter McKay’s diary: Is Kate and William’s Scottish trip a pro-union initiative?

Having dampened local republican ardour during their recent tour of New Zealand and Australia, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visit thinking-about-breaking-away Scotland next week. They’ll tour Glenturret Distillery near Crieff, Perthshire, next Thursday, to ‘bottle their own Glenturret whisky’, if you please. Sounds like a pro-union royal initiative, but what will First Minister Alex Salmond have to say? He claims he’d like the Queen to continue as Scotland’s head of state, although some of his supporters disagree. When HM said in her letter to the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly last week that she prays everyone ‘will work together for the social good of Scotland’, whatever the outcome of

Thursday

Conrad Black

Conrad Black’s diary: Why I won’t join the campaign against Rob Ford

When visiting Britain and Australia last November, I discovered that the mayor of Toronto, Robert Ford, is now the world’s best-known Canadian. He has acknowledged the occasional use of cocaine and, overall, the response to his foibles has been welcome. The world has been astounded to learn that not all English-speaking Canadians are whey-faced, monosyllabic Americans-on-Prozac. They might also learn that the contiguous metropolitan area of Toronto — now home to about seven million — has a very high standard of living and a low crime rate and is one of the world’s more impressive modern cities. The mayor is an ample and florid man who describes himself as ‘350

Thursday

Gyles Brandreth

Gyles Brandeth’s diary: The pub where the Queen came in by the fire escape

Hard on the heels of the 90th birthday of Nicholas Parsons (10 October) comes the 65th birthday of the Prince of Wales (14 November). Neither is due for retirement any day soon. Indeed, I suspect retirement would be the death of the long-serving host of Radio 4’s Just A Minute. The Duchess of Cornwall listens to his programme, I know. Perhaps her husband does too. Either way, Parsons is a perfect role model for Prince Charles. Nicholas is young at heart, unfailingly charming and wholly committed to the strange lot that fate has accorded him. He has been hosting Just A Minute for 46 years and not missed a single recording.

Thursday

Clarissa Tan

Downton Abbey is now a weird parallel universe of the royal family. Except with less action

Are you following the world’s most watched aristocratic family? If you recall, they recently took into their ranks a member of the middle classes. The family, headed by a matriarch, is as dysfunctional as any other. But they do live in a palatial home and have a coterie of servants. Their sense of fashion is unerring. There are worries about the future and about inheritance. A boy, George, has been born. Downton Abbey — now a global phenomenon — caters to our insatiable curiosity about the royal family. The more we see of Queen Elizabeth, Charles, William and Kate at processions, and so forth, the more it leaves us wanting.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

I don’t care about the royal baby. What’s wrong with me?

Driving along in the car on a pleasant evening earlier this week, I was happily humming along to the toe-tapping sounds of the sadly defunct deathcore  stalwarts Anal Prolapse, when my wife leaned over and turned the CD player off and the radio on. Those smug and portentous pips sounded. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I asked, outraged. ‘I want to know if she’s had it or not,’ my wife replied. ‘If who’s had what?’ ‘Kate. The baby.’ ‘Why?’ There was no answer to the why, from my wife or, it seems, the rest of the country. No answer to the why from the beaming gumbeys camped outside the

Gina Ford

The Contented Royal Baby: Gina Ford on how to bring up Prince George

I was delighted to hear that the Duchess of Cambridge had a healthy baby boy. The build-up to the royal birth during the last week has been phenomenal. Even my tiny ‘Contented Little Baby’ office has been affected by the birth of our future king — our email inbox is getting fuller by the day with inquiries from interested mothers about how I think the royal baby should be brought up — so much so that we have had to allocate a file called ‘Baby Cambridge’! The majority of emails ask what advice I would give the Duchess to help her through the early weeks of motherhood. The truth is

Peter Jones

Plato on the Today programme

A woman is invited to join the Today programme, and the chatteratae are immediately a-twitter on the subject of female equality. Unlikely as it seems, Plato was all in favour of it, as he argued in his Republic, and for a hysterically incorrect reason, too. Women in the ancient world had, in fact, far more important things to do than chair Footsie companies or hold down tightly scripted TV chat shows. The very existence of the state depended on them, for one simple reason: the biological imperative. Any state that did not maintain a viable population level did not survive. So since life was short and survival at birth precarious

Thursday

James Delingpole

James Delingpole’s letter to the royal baby

Congratulations, Baby Windsor. You have just been born a subject of Her Britannic Majesty (as it used to say on the passports) and have therefore won life’s lottery.  Actually, given the state of the nation and the economy, maybe ‘won life’s dog-eared scratchcard’ is more the phrase juste. Still, you’ve done amazingly well. Thanks to the freakiest odds imaginable you have, merely by the accident of being conceived by the right couple, leapfrogged to the covetable position of third in line to the British throne. So that’s the good news. The bad news is that it comes with a certain amount of baggage. Problem one: you’re a constititutional monarch. This