"Scroo you, Danes!"
The left wing broadsheet Politiken has a book review in its weekend edition that should send chills up Daisy's spine. Compare to the more gentle BT review. No one will be in the streets rioting at the gates of the Bastille-borg after reading the review of the scathing new book on the royals and their spendthrift ways, but it exposes the amazing truth about how colossally dumb the royal court is about their image, their product and that little principle of cause and effect. This book is one more chip in the palace walls that with a few more may actually render the institution of monarchy completely structurally unstable. Danes aren't stupid, but it takes time to shake off the integration of monarchy with the Danish identity. The royals are doing a better job than anyone else to chip away at the very thing that they hold so sacred. The issue of getting rid of Fred in favour of Joachim will never be one we can really indulge in as long as this freight train to Irrelevancy Town isn't slowed to a stop.
Read this article carefully, while the entire family is implecated, focus being mainly on Daisy and Frederik and their families, it is pretty clear that the royal patient was infected about 10 years ago. There is no coincidence that this points to the dawn of the Mary Boganson Era. Daisy got a nasty, skanky scapegoat to marry her weak older son to draw attention away from her younger son's divorce, believing that her court's magic-making set design would be enough to sate the Danes. She did not bet that the Danes could handle a divorce, nor did she really think through the skank princess angle. So, riding high on her own perceived success, she has taken on more lax thought and rewards for her brilliance at orchestrating no mass revolts. It's not the 18th century, Daisy. People see through your crap now. You didn't think much of them, then saddled them with an idiot who weakens your older son even more thoroughly. Now they are on to you. Control your family (family meeting time: everyone works and more than now and no whinging), take some financial openness and shared sacrifice cues from Cousin Lilibet in England (no more VAT refunds and now you pay taxes on investment income and private property, no more free gifts from a Danish company that are more than 500 kroner in value with gift tax paid on the amount up to 500 kr.), and reorient the monarchy toward community service (send someone to every single soldier's funeral if the family agrees, be on scene when a large, deadly fire breaks out or a school shooting happens, start and join charities that address the dark side of Danish society: immigrants' issues, depression, poverty.)
Review: Politiken
Shining a Bright Light On The Royal House's Abusive Cronyism With Tax Money
Entertaining book about Glücksburg family focuses on the misuse of tax dollars.By Lars Trier Mogensen, editor
If a little too creative use of 180,000 kroner by five political events at a circus school in Sydhavnen can get people to sneer, there is reason to caution against reading by journalist Jens Høvsgaards new book about the royal family: People are at risk of splitting the palate along when they find out how shamelessly, carelessly and nepotistic members of the royal family from Glücksburg forms and controls thousands of kroners in tax money.
In five days the royal family burns as much money as Afuk got for a new circus in 2013. The total cost of the royal entertainers is about half a billion kroner a year, incl. guards, VAT refunds and tax evasion.
And in a media environment in which any mention of the royal family is sweetened in pink baby romance, the charity with a critical unraveling of the extravagant use of money, suspicious sponsorships and confusion of public funds and private economic interests. The family at Amalienborg should not spell the annual welfare of over 100 million kroner.
These prosecutions may sound a bit dramatic, but the book is not aggressively written.
On the contrary, Jens Høvsgaard used a classic journalistic approach: he throws the royal family personages in the air - and ends by facing their relationships as best he can, given the secrecy - and then let them fall down and hit themselves.
He proves that the royal family members accept sponsorship donations in the millions, for example with expensive cars, which would be profoundly unlawful touching anyone else in public office.
Criminal law is clear, or as a professor of administrative law Claus Haagen Jensen quoted: "Those who give the royal gifts, are subject to a bribery clause'.
Even the royal family, however, stands above the law - and can behave as Berlusconi or Putin. Behind the sanctity and carte blanche in the Constitution, the Royal Family - as Høvsgaard shows - in recent years has embarked on a bribery culture that is worthy of a banana republic.
Opening 'It Costs a Kingdom' is like stepping into a corrupt African presidential palace, a parallel society of publicly paid group mentality, wasting and decadence. Margrethe, Frederik and the other royal figures living in a feudal time warp where debauchery and cronyism are considered hallmarks.
The strong and stable group of Danes who supports the idea of monarchy and its inherited privileges will be able to find in all sorts of contortions to apologise for the royal family's behaviour.
Basically, one can also ask how something so irrational anachronistic as a monarchy at all should be developed - now the majority of voters actually support the project - if the royal family not just to behave theatrically flamboyant.
For it this not the purpose? To mark an impassable difference to everyday trivialities? An eternal reality show that's really real. The book is thus, paradoxically, helping to make the royal family more popular, because it confirms that on the surface periodically people in the royal family at least try to behave as spectacular, extra-parliamentary and above the law - and thus retain a certain aura of something extraordinary.
Monarchy can be seen as the exception that proves that the rest of society is based on open principles. Høvsgaards weighting of individual cases and personal scandals can be blamed for drowning the more fundamental debates about the royal family's constitutional role, including the bizarre sessions of the Council of State, where all laws signed with the words "We Margrethe the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of Denmark, hereby proclaim".
But strictly speaking, the royal house is an empty ceremony outside the family, and therefore it is essential to focus so sharply on the characters, as Jens Høvsgaard in his easily read and relevant book.
He exposes the absurdity of the scale, so people can decide.
