The UK does not have a royal crisis
It has a constitutional crisis
A few days back, I posted the above article, which looks at the explanation for why Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is called by that name; and why it is in many ways a misnomer.
The two parts of the double-barrelled surname are contrivances dating from the year 1917, which were intended to pull the wool over the British public’s eyes as to the German origins of both the Greek royal family (whose descendent was Prince Philip, the old queen’s husband and, by extension, AMW) and the British royal family (of which, clearly, the queen herself was a descendent, and AMW is the relevant one here). In 1917, after the U.S. joined the war, Germany was under pressure and within a year and a quarter, had surrendered at Compiègne. The idea of being a British king and having a German name was starting to be a bad one. So, George V changed his own name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor, and the Battenbergs (some of whom were descended from Queen Victoria) switched their name to Mountbatten.
It is a technique not unfamiliar to other parts of the world where assimilation is necessary. For instance, Netanyahu was not the birth name of the Israeli prime minister’s father, which had been Milekowsky, but which didn’t sound Middle Eastern enough to persuade Palestinians that not only did Israel lay claim to a right of occupancy dating back millennia, but so did their Jewish masters, when in fact they were from Russia. Actor Martin Sheen couldn’t get work when he started out with his birth name of Ramon Estevez. People wouldn’t employ him as a Spaniard with an Irish mother. But as the perfectly polished Mr Sheen, he was made. He didn’t waste his time off screen, either: he’s been arrested 66 times for his activism in favour of civic rights.
Image: Martin Sheen as Jed Bartlet in The West Wing.
Mountbatten-Windsor’s name came from his mother and his father’s mother, and it ought really to have derived from his father’s father. All he’s now doing is perpetuating this veil of deceit. There’s no shame nowadays in being German, so why don’t they simply change this ludicrous name-changing pageantry back to how it originally was? After all, aside from one short visit after the title was created in the 19th century as a cadet branch of the House of Hesse-Darmstadt, no member of the Battenberg family has ever lived in the village of Battenberg: the castle’s actually in ruins, and wasn’t even built by the Battenberg family anyway, but by the House of Leiningen. And Mountbatten is a place that simply doesn’t exist.
It’s not easy to change your birth name, not anywhere. International security criteria are now such that so much as a misspelling can see you refused entry to another country or refused a passport or getting AML blacklisting (one spectacular ploy by the infamous North Korean Lazarus Gang was only foiled because of a single spelling error in a nominee transferee’s name, which prevented millions of dollars being lost to fraudsters). The reason is obvious: if a dangerous person is to be caught and punished for their crimes, the task is more difficult if they can simply switch names. So, why is it that companies can switch their names so easily?
There is a rule in Belgium that, if a company gets set up but is inadequately capitalised and, as a result, goes into bankruptcy within three years of its incorporation, the founder is personally liable for the resultant liabilities. After the three-year cut-off, the company’s liability is limited and the founder ceases to be personally liable for his company’s debts. So, it’s important to be sure to have enough capital to bridge that three-year period.
I own a company and I’m trying to sell it right now. It would have a tax liability when I sold it, and I’m asking the buyer to pay my tax bill in order to take over the company. “Why on earth would he do that?” you might ask. The first reason is speed. You can register a company fairly quickly in Belgium, maybe a few weeks because you need a financial plan and to raise the capital and everything.
But that doesn’t explain why it’s any use to a new buyer to take over my tax liability. And the answer is that by taking over an existing company, changing its name and perhaps its objects, the new owner will not be personally liable for three years, the way he would be if he were to set up his own new company.
I find that extraordinary. The purpose of the rule is to ensure that a new business is properly capitalised. But the 2019 companies legislation here did away for the need to have statutory capital of 1,800 euros for a private company. Now, all you need is capital of one euro, but you bear that personal liability. So buying my company lets you avoid the risk of going bankrupt. It doesn’t stop you going bankrupt if you’re a hopeless businessman, but it doesn’t involve your private assets as collateral for the company’s debts. And I think that that’s wrong, but it’s the way it is.
A company is an artificial person, but they are not subject in any meaningful way to the rules that apply to real persons. Yet the only reason they get created is because people can channel transactions through them that would cost them dearly in terms of reputation, financial risk, harm done to others and tax if they were done in the name of the actual people who are doing the transaction. When Mr Sheen portrays a character, like Jed Bartlet, the fictional U.S. president in The West Wing, people know that it’s Martin Sheen who’s on the screen. But, after a few minutes of watching, it’s not really Sheen who’s there. It’s Jed Bartlet. We follow the story and forget who it is who’s playing the character, and that’s also what happens when a company is interposed between the billionaire and the public he is fleecing with his corporate affairs.
When Monsanto’s scurrilous deceptions in the Round-up glysophate concealment came to light, they sold the assets to Bayer, and left the Germans to clear up the mess. But after United Fruit had arranged for the massacre of 2,000 striking banana plantation workers in Colombia in 1928, they switched their name to Chiquita, and invented cute Carmen Miranda-style cartoon characters to persuade American housewives to put banana on their kids’ cornflakes every morning.
Perhaps the best illustration of what’s wrong with corporate image cosmetics can be seen in the 1997 movie Face/Off, in which archrivals John Travolta and Nicholas Cage end up wearing each other’s faces: but even that physical change cannot alter the personalities of the men beneath the surgery. It was a fascinating film to see how the two actors adopted each other’s mannerisms and characters, and likewise revealing to the audience how, change a name all you will, a rose will always stink as bad.
King Charles may be prepared to lend his support to police investigations into AMW, but he’s only saving his own skin, and that of his royal firm. Now there are voices being raised to have AMW removed from the line of succession, and that has to be the greatest joke of all. First, the line of succession is supposed to be sacrosanct in a monarchy: it can’t be fiddled with. That was the entire controversy over the execution of Charles I, the warming-pan baby that would become the Old Pretender, and the abdication of Edward VIII. A king who suspends parliament—constitutional crisis; an illegitimate Catholic successor to the throne—constitutional crisis; a king who wants to marry an American divorcee—constitutional crisis. You can’t just annul the crisis by whipping a wrongdoer who will admit of no wrongdoing out from the line of succession. After all, what has he done wrong? Is he not entitled to the presumption of innocence, the defence of which is the bulwark of the legal system that exercises justice in the king’s name? Hm?
If the line of monarchical succession is to be manipulated to ensure that we can always cherry-pick a half-acceptable head of state in Britain (not to mention divinely appointed head of the Church of England), then why not just go the whole hog and elect a head of state? We may not necessarily get a good one, but at least we have an established procedure for getting rid of them and don’t need to fret like headless chickens when they turn out to be passing state secrets to what turns out to be the enemy. The fact that some elected presidents might turn out to be even worse than Charles I simply means that people need to be readier to set up barricades more often than is their wont.