Let there be knights
Like a four year old having a tantrum half way through their own birthday party, the knighting of Prince Philip is nothing more than a vindictive act on the part of a failing prime minister.
Abbott is furious that his first term has not panned out the way he had hoped. Instead of making an effort to improve his reputation with the voting public, he opted for revenge: bestowing an outdated honour on one of the most reviled figures in the British establishment. It is the adult equivalent of smearing cake on the wall after being told the party franks have run out.
So, at risk of being sent home with no lolly-bag, here are five reasons why Prince Philip should not be given the highest public honour and instead might benefit from a lethal dose of horse tranquilliser:
1. The guy opposes democracy. Prince Philip has a well-established animosity to the elected arm of British government, famously referring to a member of the civil service as “a silly little Whitehall twit” before going on to point out “I don’t trust you and you don’t trust me.” During a visit to Paraguay, he commented to the dictator, General Stroessner, “It’s a pleasure to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people.”
2. He is a Nazi sympathiser. The links between the British royal family and the Nazis are well documented, particularly in Royals and the Reich, released in 2006. The book includes pictures of Philip, aged 16, at the 1937 funeral of his elder sister Cecile, flanked by relatives in SS and Brownshirt uniforms.
They included his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, to whom he was close. Another picture shows his youngest sister, Sophia, sitting opposite Hitler at the wedding of Hermann and Emmy Goering. In a 2006 interview, Prince Philip said his family found the Nazi regime “attractive” and that they had “inhibitions about the Jews” and were “jealous of their success”. He has also described how he and his family had “a lot of enthusiasm for the Nazis at the time, the economy was good, we were anti-communist and who knew what was going to happen to the regime?”
All four of his sisters married German princes, and the three who survived into adulthood all joined the Nazi party. Sophia’s husband, Prince Christoph of Hesse, became chief of Goering’s secret intelligence service and was a frequent guest at Nazi functions. So while supporters of Palestine are frequently and slanderously labelled anti-Semitic for opposing Israel’s atrocities, those who cheered on the actual Nazi regime and shared its ideology are celebrated and honoured.
3. He’s a racist. Prince Philip’s racist gaffes could fill a book, but perhaps his most offensive was made in India during a 1997 visit to the site of the Amritsar massacre. In 1919, British troops opened fire on a demonstration in Amritsar against British rule, killing up to 2,000 civilians. Prince Philip, who served in the Cadets of the Royal Navy with the son of the general responsible for the massacre, commented while at the site that the death toll was “vastly exaggerated”. He also told a British student in China in 1986: “If you stay here much longer, you’ll go home with slitty eyes.” More recently, he insulted Aboriginal leader William Brin, when he asked him “Do you still throw spears at each other?”
4. He is a good for nothing parasite who has never worked a day in his life. Like the rest of the royals, he has bludged off the public purse. So while Abbott and Hockey lecture us about the supposed Age of Entitlement, the most entitled among us is decorated with awards. Not that Prince Philip has no empathy with the plight of ordinary people and his fellow unemployed. During the depths of the early 1980s recession in Britain, he sensitively observed, “A few years ago, everybody was saying we must have more leisure, everyone’s working too much. Now everybody’s got more leisure time they’re complaining they’re unemployed. People don’t seem to make up their minds what they want.”
Perhaps the only redeeming feature of Prince Philip is that he is not John Howard, who appears to be a hot favourite for the accolade in 2016. Attorney General George Brandis declared Howard would “absolutely” be worthy of a knighthood, and that “there is no honour too great for Mr Howard”.
Whether or not Abbott will be in a position to be doling out knight and damehoods this time next year remains to be seen. But this gratuitous act – part desperation, part spite – is certainly not going to make that more likely.
