Daily Mail, Friday, September 6, 2019 Page 35Is Archie
really too
titchy for
a trip to
Balmoral?
Are you thinking
what she’s thinking?
moir
erto unknown age/size restriction,
it is laughable. What is Archie,
some bit of luggage they had hoped
to stow in the hold of their non-
private jet because they don’t do
that sort of thing any more?
And anyway, what is more porta-
ble than a little bub in a basket?
On the scale of travel hassle, Baby
Sussex is right up there with a yoga
mat and he’s less bothersome than
a kitten. After all, royal babes in
arms have been travelling to and
from Balmoral for decades, with no
hint of trouble or stress.Y
et — and this is the real
problem — Harry is now
so caught up in his own
righteous storm and so
contemptuous of those who dare
to criticise him that he no longer
bothers to give reasons that
might stand up to scrutiny or
understanding. Instead, he just
says the first thing that comes into
his head and to hell with it.
‘I have to fly on private jets for
family security! Ninety-nine per
cent of my life is spent on commer-
cial airlines! Archie is too titchy for
Balmoral! Don’t do as I do, do as I
say,’ is what he seems to be saying.
He cannot even accept that he
might be in the wrong. ‘No one is
perfect. We could all do better,’ he
said earlier this week, launching a
global project to make the tourist
industry more sustainable.
No, Harry. You could do better. A
lot better. Leave us out of this.
It might seem extraordinary thatHarry would not want to visit his
93-year-old grandmother with his
new baby, a Balmoral rite of
passage that is a staunch tradition
within the family.
It had been widely expected that
this summer would mark Meghan’s
first stay there. the Sussexes did
not go last year as Meghan was in
the early stages of pregnancy, but
now we live in strange royal times.
It is easy to understand the
Sussexes’ desire to live a different
kind of life, to want to rip up the
royal rulebook and do things
their way.
In many ways, their energy in this
direction is admirable. Yet all it hasresulted in is a rising crescendo of
ill will as they clatter gormlessly
from one PR disaster to the next.
One can only imagine how the
Sussexes must seethe, when the
perfect, immaculate Cambridges
dutifully hop on their budget
flight to Balmoral, then turn up
looking like the picture-perfect
family on Princess Charlotte’s first
day at school.
Unlike their gaffe-prone younger
counterparts, the Duke and
Duchess of Cambridge rarely put a
foot wrong.
Yet William and Kate are a future
king and queen, parents to three
direct heirs to the British throne.
Public expectation about their
role in society is only matched
by the greater responsibilities to
the Crown they must bear — not
to mention their sense of duty
and destiny.
For them, the bar is set so
much higher.B
Y COMPARISON, the
Sussexes have the
freedom to live the kind of
woke vegan lives they find
attractive, to hang out with the
celebrities they seem to adore and
to make the kind of lifestyle choices
that suit them.
Fine — but please, please don’t
insult everyone by fobbing us off
with these pathetic excuses for the
choices you make.
If the Sussexes really want
privacy and protection — which is
Harry’s excuse for everything, from
taking private jets to leading a
cloak-and-dagger expedition about
his son’s birth and subsequent
christening — then where better
than Balmoral?
After all, it is a fortress deep in a
forest, in a 50,000-acre estate
enclosed in a national park
50 miles from the nearest city.
But for reasons unknown, this
is not the kind of privacy that
the couple covet, so on with the
show we go.Oh the joy of a crazy
little thing called love
NO, I did not love the film,
Bohemian Rhapsody. How-
ever, I do adore the lead
actors, Rami Malek and Lucy
Boynton, who played Freddie
Mercury and his friend Mary
Austin respectively.
After meeting on set, they
fell for each other and have
been dating since early last
year. Theirs is a love story that
could outdo any Hollywood
film for its utter drenching
romance. Not least because
despite being young — he is
38, she is 24 — they are so
thrillingly old school. Rami
always pays tribute to Lucy
when accepting any awards
for the hit film.
‘My ally, my confidante, mylove. I appreciate you so
much,’ he will say onstage.
‘You have captured my heart.’
Photos of the couple at the
Venice Film Festival this
week also captured some of
their allure.
Look at them! I love Lucy’s
dress. Her hair. Her shoes. Her
darling handbag. But most of
all, I love the way she is
looking at Rami, her face
radiant with that unmistake-
able glow of love.
Imagine being a beautiful
and talented 24-year-old film
star in Venice with the man
you love. Imagine being 24!
It’s a crazy little thing called
love, as Freddy once sang, and
it is lovely to behold.P
OOR baby Archie. His
parents, the Duke and
Duchess of Sussex, are said
to have decided he is too
small to travel to Balmoral
and so they will not be accepting
the Queen’s invitation to join her
there this year.
So Archie, darling, thou shalt not go to
the Highland ball after all. thou shalt miss
the drizzle and the midges and the slow
glory of the green Scottish highlands rust-
ing into the crisp embrace of autumn.
thou shalt also miss the thunder of the
guns out on the moors, as the shooting
season gets into full swing and the downed
game-birds rain upon the heather bam-
bam-bam like some bloody apocalypse
amid a howling torrent of guts and gore.
Up on the killing fields of Balmoral, if it
flies it dies, if it hops it drops and if it’s
brown it’s down, boom.
Well. Not quite. Not at all, really.
Yet I suspect this is how the Californian
duchess imagines a gentle afternoon of
grouse-shooting or deer-stalking might be
like. And I wonder if it is her aversion to
hunting and bloodsports that is the reason
behind this surprising Scottish no show?
After all, Archie was big enough to travel
to Nice to see Uncle elton John recently.
the four-month-old was also not too
teeny-weeny to fly to Ibiza for a lovely
break to celebrate mummy’s birthday
over the summer.
Need I add that both of those trips are
much farther afield than the 500-mile trek
from the Sussexes’ home in Windsor to the
Queen’s Scottish castle?
Yet Balmoral is suddenly a no-go zone,
for reasons that remain unclear.
Although ‘Palace sources’ have denied
Archie’s age is the reason, if Prince Harry’s
excuse is that his son is below some hith-A FRIEND is on a hiking
holiday in Umbria. Yester-
day, he rose at the crack of
sparrow, walked 20 miles into
a deeper wilderness than the
wilderness he was already in
and arrived at a remote
taverna where he had booked
his lunch.
The chef was turning rabbits
on an open grill. There was noone else in the restaurant and
neither man could speak the
other’s language to any great
purpose. But sometimes world
events can forge an under-
standing between cultures that
defies any linguistic hurdles.
‘Boris una disaster!’ cried the
chef, uncorking something
rough and red. ‘Si,’ sighed my
friend, and took a deep gulp.CARA DELEVINGNE has
become the highest
paid model, earning
£21.5 million last year.
Modelling might seem like a
job which requires very
little skill or ability, but that
is only because the greatest
models make it seem so
easy. I think stunning Cara is
probably worth every
penny — but is hers the most
amazing British face ever?
More iconic than Twiggy or
Kate Moss? Definitely.
Greater than Jean
Shrimpton, finest of them
all? Almost, but not quite.Somebody to love: Lucy and RamiSLIP