Royal Scandals c. 8000 BC - AD 2007

It is impossible to exaggerate the sadness at the death of Royal Scandals, which have passed away following news that the best our monarchies can manage these days is some relatively uninteresting sex 'n' drugs allegations about "a minor royal" with "a low public profile". They will be fondly remembered for all the good works they did down the years, keeping millions enthralled and entertained and providing much useful work for paparazzi, indifferent journalists willing to swallow their pride and make a living reporting the antics of a bunch of men and women whose generations of inbreeding have left them with the noble chin, intellectual weight and dignified bearing of one of Wimpy's "Benders in a Bun", and dimwitted aristocratic offspring in desperate need of a family to marry into after failing the entrance exams for floristry and kindergarten assistant.

Rather than dwell on their sad and ignominious end - begging for a headline in the Sunday Times after overhyping in the company of members of the press - we at As A Dodo much prefer to remember Royal Scandals as the great things they once were: hanging around with kings and queens, empresses and emperors, pharaohs, shahs, rajas and ranis from the moment monarchy was first thought of, capable of altering the history of nations and the destinies of millions.

Oh what great times Royal Scandals once had - appalling whole nations even as ancient spin doctors tried to cover them up. Who can forget the quick-witted Egyptian priest who informed a shocked nation that the young pharaoh had only been pleasuring himself out of the palace window in order to fertilise the Nile, or the Greek sage who told the Macedonian troops that what they had seen was merely Hephaestion polishing King Alexander's sarissa before the battle?

Despite such attempts at suppression, by the time of the Romans Royal Scandals had assumed their rightful place in society - keeping comics and clowns, playwrights and players, hecklers and historians in business as they chronicled Emperors happy to entertain their people by marrying their sister before breakfast, murdering them by lunchtime and hopping into bed with their horse by tea.

With the rise of monarchies across Europe, Royal Scandals' opportunities multiplied. Strange sexual preferences, killings and overfamiliar meetings between the species were commonplace - it was not long before those in the know were reporting everything from Phillipe I, Duc d'Orléans's habit of wandering the docks in female attire blowing kisses to the sailors, through Pope Alexander VI's first murder (carried out at the age of 12) all the way to Queen Catherine the Great's stable relationship with Bruno the carthorse. Matters such as King Henry VIII of England's serial marriages and lethal divorce settlements were small beer, even though they helped found a new church.

Ah yes, those were the great days! Yet even in decline, Royal Scandals still had the power to shock. Tales of Marie Antoinette's excess helped to feed the flame of revolution, tales of King George III's madness and the dissolute George IV's divorce threatened the monarchy in England. But it was all downhill from here. Where once a true scandal would have required at least a few deaths or a dangerous liaison with a llama, by the 20th century the best that could be offered to shatter the world's peace was Edward VIII's decision to marry an American divorcee.

The decline continued apace as minor Royals across Europe took to sucking toes and slipping off their bikinis to whip up a whiff of naughtiness, while the best their more senior colleagues could manage was Princess Diana's liaisons with a string of well-heeled dimwits and Prince Charles's fondly-expressed desire to grow up one day to be a tampon⁽¹⁾. Even young Prince Harry found his Bad Boy Reputation almost impossible to maintain.

Royal Scandals' final hour came when, following allegations that two men had attempted to blackmail a royal with an envelope of cocaine and a sex video, the whole of the internet was filled with precisely five people trying to find out who the Royal was, while everyone else turned over the pages of their newspapers to read the soccer scores.

Royal Scandals will be buried at St Catherine's Church of the Hole-y Harness. A minor royal will snort several lines from the Bible and the congregation will sing Hymn 365 "All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the royals have had them all".

⁽¹⁾ which would, admittedly, be more useful than being Prince Charles.

The Queen's Loss of Sang Froid 11 July 2007-12 July 2007

A worried nation was today gathered before the gates of Buckingham Palace, awaiting news of The Queen's Loss of Sang Froid, which is understood to have passed away yesterday during an official statement from the British Broadcasting Corporation.

The Queen's Loss of Sang Froid was born on 11 July 2007 in front of a select gathering of journalists in a small screening room at the BBC. The birth was overseen by BBC1 Controller Peter Fincham. Sadly - perhaps owing to a brief flashback to his terrible time taking fire in the BBC trenches after his decision to commission a chat show starring Davina McCall - it appears that Mr Fincham became distracted during the birth and failed to notice that a large section of questionably edited videotape, appearing to show Her Majesty storming out of a photo-session with the acclaimed photographer Annie Leibowitz after being asked to remove her tiara, had become wound round the baby's neck.

All present were so horrified by the result - which seemed to reveal Her Majesty the Queen acting in a manner more befitting of a mere human being than a head of state⁽¹⁾ - that they immediately ran off to their editors and producers demanding that front pages be cleared and tops of the bulletins be emptied to make space for their astonishing and vital news story.

And yet, despite the eagerness of the press, The Loss of Sang Froid was too sickly to live. By the time Mr Fincham at last discovered the presence of the deceptively edited videotape and informed the nation of his error The Loss of Sang Froid had already passed away and The Queen's Sang Froid - that calm, determined and unsmiling manner so beloved of the British people and press (save when they are all threatening to rise up and destroy the monarchy unless she shred her clothes and beat her breasts in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales) - was restored.

The Queen's Loss of Sang Froid will be buried in St Tabloid's Church of the Low Media Standards between the grave of the Unknown Fact-Checker and the rapidly revolving tomb of Lord Reith. At the same time the BBC will enact the Ceremony of the Rolling Heads, in which an utterly blameless producer in BBC radio and a couple of low-paid writers will be fired for the delectation of the media, while the mysterious figure at the independent production company who thought it would be a good idea to sex-up their dull royal documentary by splicing together a dodgy edit will be granted a £500K bonus and three new commissions for BBC1.

The Queen's Loss of Sang Froid is survived by a media that thinks it is a scandal to suggest Her Majesty might have a hissy fit but sees no problem whatsoever with suggesting that MMR causes autism, global warming is not manmade, wi-fi technology can cause allergies and that the best solution to illness and disease is a couple of drops of water from a homoeopath or a diet based solely on walnuts and chinchilla droppings.

⁽¹⁾ Our American readers are at this point advised that the British still retain the quaint custom of believing, however erroneously, that the head of state should not conduct themselves in the manner of a belligerent chimpanzee.^(2)
(2) or indeed, given William Jefferson Clinton's performance in the role, a sex-starved bonobo.

The Royal Prerogative mid-5th Century-2007

In the light of recent criticism, we at As A Dodo are sad⁽¹⁾ at having to burden our readers with yet another badly-researched, ill-informed, mendacious and mean-spirited travesty, 'obituarising' (if we may be forgiven the somewhat ugly coinage) yet another easy target, The Royal Prerogative.

The Royal Prerogative was born in Britain in the middle of the 5th Century AD, following the collapse of the Roman Empire's last outposts in Albion. It succeeded the Imperial Prerogative, those powers which, according to scholars, allowed the Emperors of Rome to spread literacy, hygiene, roads, international trade and (like Gordon Brown) taxation and which, according to viewers of BBC2's "Rome", allowed all Romans to wander round with their kit off, have lots of sex and stab at least 20 people an episode.

The Royal Prerogative constituted those powers, privileges and immunities which were the appanage of British kingship. The earliest ruler known to have exercised such power was the legendary King Vortigern, who used The Prerogative chiefly to give control of parts of England to the Saxons, a tradition which Eurosceptics claim has been upheld in more recent times by successive UK Governments.

The centuries that followed Vortigern were to see a steady erosion of Prerogative power. The first to feel this was King Canute, whose attempt to bypass not merely Parliament but Mother Nature by issuing an Order in Council preventing the rising tide ended in humiliation and barnacles on his sceptre and orbs.

Though by the end of Elizabeth I's reign the House of Commons was to claim that while ‘the prerogatives of princes may easily and do daily grow … the privileges of the subject being once lost are not recovered but with much disquiet’, the next 80 years were to see The Prerogative decline even more rapidly. When Charles I attempted to use The Prerogative to rule and fund his administration without Parliament's approval (something which gave rise to the traditional office of Rouge Lord Levy Cash-Pursuivant) he swiftly had it cut off - along with his head - by Oliver Cromwell and his Parliamentary followers. Even after the restoration, Parliament was increasingly keen to flex its muscles against arbitrary rule by the monarch, leading to 1688's "Glorious" Revolution and the 1700 Act of Settlement which did to the The Prerogative pretty much what a red-hot poker did to Edward II.

Stripped of much of its power, The Prerogative was to struggle on, now vested in "The Crown", rather than the monarch, and used by Government to do everything from declaring wars, ordering the dissolution of Parliament (as opposed to the dissolution of MPs, many of whom can be pretty dissolute all by themselves) to choosing bishops, leaving the monarch his or herself to be contented with owning all the kingdom's swans and sturgeons.

Despite its age and relative feebleness, The Prerogative was still exercised on a regular basis. Even in the early 21st Century Prime Minister Blair was giving it a run round in the yard on a regular basis, usually in order to get it to declare war on other countries. With the passing of this last loyal master, however, it was clear to all that The Prerogative was not fit to survive in the modern world and it was put down at the behest of its new owner, Gordon Brown.

The Royal Prerogative will be buried this weekend. Tony Blair will read from the Book of Britney "Everybody's talking all this stuff about me, why don't they just let me live? I don't need permission, make my own decisions, that's my prerogative".

⁽¹⁾ By which we mean, "too gorged on our own self-satisfaction to give a monkey's".

Prince Harry's Bad Boy Reputation 2002-2007: A Correction

We at As A Dodo Towers wish to apologise to our readers for yet another massive cock-up serious errors in our obituary for Prince Harry's Bad Boy Reputation. We have been contacted by officials at Clarence House who have asked us to note that senior Army officers have now realised that it is entirely possible that as (a) a soldier in the British army and (b) in all probability the son of the heir to the throne, there is some slight chance of the young Prince being targeted by those opposing the British and American presence in that benighted land⁽¹⁾. Indeed we further understand from reports in the British press (apparently based on a conversation with someone in the pub, who knows a bloke who knows a bloke who once read Andy McNab's "Bravo Two Zero") that orders have already been issued to an unidentified (and almost certainly fictional) sniper to regard Prince Harry as his sole target⁽²⁾. In the circumstances we have been asked to point out that Prince Harry will not now be joining his regiment in Iraq and, accordingly, his Bad Boy Reputation will, far from being dead, continue to get drunk at West End nightclubs, dress up in Nazi regalia and punch the odd journalist just for the hell of it.

We apologise most sincerely for any distress our report may have caused to either the Prince's family or to tabloid editors desperate for a Royal story for the front page.

⁽¹⁾ currently understood to be everyone in Iraq except the guy with the lucrative illicit booze contract for the US forces at Baghdad's Camp Justice.
⁽²⁾ we are further advised that Mohammed Al fayed's lawyers are now seeking to have the current inquest into Diana, Princess of Wales, ruled a nullity owing to the refusal of the coroner, Baroness Butler-Sloss to allow them to call this same fictional sniper to give evidence.

Prince William and Kate Middleton’s Relationship 2003-2007

As A Dodo departs from its reports of bereavements in the public eye with the following obituary of an ordinary relationship between two hitherto unknown twentysomethings.

The relationship of ‘Prince’ William - an officer in the Household Cavalry’s Blues and Royals and the son of an eccentric biscuit manufacturer and a kindergarten teacher - and Kate Middleton - a fashion buyer for a high street store born into a middle-class family of toy manufacturers - has ended after failing to attract any interest whatsoever in the media or, more crucially, with the public at large.

This very ordinary relationship began, as so many do, when the couple first met at the little known University of St Andrews in Scotland (a small, insignificant country off the coast of England whose chief claim-to-fame is its cuisine traditionally deep-fried in North Sea oil¹). Soon the couple were sharing a house in order to make the most of their meagre student loans and eking out an impoverished life as they studied art history.

Keen to capitalise on their relationship and hopeful of becoming the kind of minor celebrities whose every movement and fashion faux pas is picked over by the tabloids and daytime television, William and Kate began to cultivate a lifestyle normally associated with the over-privileged and under-educated. They visited racecourses, hung out in nightclubs and took jobs as chalet maids at Klosters (a ski resort popular with eccentric biscuit manufacturers and the aristocracy) – but to no avail as their faces remained as unknown as the other members of David Cameron's shadow cabinet.

Digging themselves deeper in debt, the couple were forced to resort to more daring tactics to fund their dreams of fame, with William even going as far as to claim that he was somehow related to Britain's deeply-respected Royal Family.

Thinking that a nobler and heroic gesture would garner the recognition they craved, William joined the Household Cavalry’s Blues and Royals and began training for a tour of duty in Iraq . When this failed to excite either journalists or gossip columnists Kate, in desperation, complained to the Press Complaints Commission about the lack of media intrusion. The PCC, however, refused to instruct the newspapers to publish paparazzi photographs of her on a bus, walking down the street or, sensationally, holding a cup of coffee.

An emergency meeting of William’s family struck the fatal blow, when his grandfather, ‘Prince’ Philip (an old sea dog with a deep interest in world wildlife) urged William to do the decent thing. William, however, declined to dispatch Kate with a 12-bore or a white Fiat Panda and decided instead to break off his relationship citing the pressures of his military career and a woman he met in a Bournemouth nightclub.

After four failed years of striving for public recognition, the relationship will be buried on the front pages of the tabloids and the inside pages of the tabloids and the broadsheets for the next six months before being completely forgotten about when William manages to hook up with someone else.

¹ The As A Dodo editors wish to point out at this stage that the author of this obituary is of Scottish descent and that his embittered state is, apparently, the product of years spent as a youth believing that his country might actually fail to make fools of themselves in the World Cup. Happily, today this distressing delusional state is found only among English football fans.

Prince Harry's Bad Boy Reputation 2002-2007

Buckingham Palace insiders and Ministry of Defence officials have today confirmed to a shocked nation that the "Bad Boy" reputation of third in line to the British throne Prince Harry has passed away, replaced in its prime by the heroic reputation of plain "Cornet Wales": not, as some had assumed, a Duchy Organic ice cream flavour but rather the title the Prince will bear during his military service in Iraq as a member of the Blues and Royals Regiment.

Prince Harry's Bad Boy reputation was born in 2002. Like so many Bad Boys, Prince Harry earned his reputation after years of living off the state and wandering around aimlessly on vast estates. Though admittedly the estates Harry wandered around had much better grouse shooting than the average inner-city tower block, the Prince nonetheless followed the path of many a bored British teen and began drinking heavily and smoking cannabis. Relatives feared these habits might go from bad to worse, leading to addiction to hard drugs or even dabbling with standing for the Conservative leadership.

Despite the Prince's antics having landed him on the front page of every British tabloid, there were soon concerns for his newbown Bad Boy Reputation when it was announced that he would be attending a drug counselling centre for a day. Much to the consternation of all those - chiefly newspaper editors - who cared about the Reputation, Harry soon seemed to have turned his back on his rebellious ways and learned to follow more traditional Royal standards of behaviour, falling off polo ponies and calling his French chef a "F***ing Frog".

Happily for all concerned, Harry was soon back on form again and by 2005 he was partying the nights away in West End nightclubs and engaging in drunken scuffles with members of the paparazzi.

In the same year the Prince entered the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, intent on becoming a cavalry officer despite warnings that he was obviously overqualified for such a post, being in possession of a chin. Thankfully he passed the Sandhurst intelligence test with flying colours, pushing hard on a door marked "pull" for well in excess of the half hour normally required for officer material. Those who feared that pulling on the uniform his ancestors had worn with pride might prove a fatal blow to his Bad Boy reputation were proved wrong when the uniform in question turned out to be that of a Schutzstaffel Oberfũhrer.

Despite such positive signs, Prince Harry's Bad Boy Reputation - a vital part of both the nation's heritage and the newspaper circulation battle - slipped away this week following the announcement that the Prince is to lead a troop of 12 men in Iraq. The Reputation will be buried with full military honours and an item of fruit inserted in its rear after a street brawl outside a Mayfair nightspot. It is survived by acres of newsprint praising Harry as a modern-day Achilles and the only 12 British soldiers in Iraq who can be absolutely confident of having all the latest military equipment (boots, body armour, working guns) and backup they could ever want.

The Death of Diana, Princess of Wales 1997-2006

A grieving nation was this morning waking to the knowledge that the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales - which has exercised bloggers, newspaper columnists and other members of the personality- disordered classes for the last nine years - has died. According to police accounts Diana's Death was being driven at speed by an Egyptian man drunk on money when it ran completely out of control and crashed into Lord Stevens' inquiry into the circumstances of the late ex-royal's death.

The Death of Princess Diana first came to prominence in 1997 when the ex-wife of heir-to-the-throne and pontificator-in-chief Prince Charles was transformed overnight from a good-looking, rather dim, mother of two and the subject of salacious tabloid gossip and innuendo-laden jokes into a saintly figure of surpassing goodness and victim of an uncaring world by the combination of a tragic accident and a mawkish media. It reached its apotheosis only weeks later when the late Princess was buried in a sea of hypocrisy and appalling Elton John singles by millions of people, all of whom claimed to have some deep personal connection with Diana, despite never having come within a paparazzo's focal-length of her.

Only days after the funeral, members of the police were called to the burial site where they discovered that the Death of Diana had been removed from its grave by a group of men described by witnesses as a "bunch of internet nutters, desperate tabloid editors and Mohamed Al Fayed". The men are understood to have taken the corpse to a laboratory at The Daily Express where they strove desperately to resurrect Diana's death by injecting it with front page headlines and a series of incredible conspiracy theories involving the British security services and the Duke of Edinburgh, including the extraordinary suggestion that (a) the Duke of Edinburgh and (b) the staff of MI6 are capable of performing anything beyond basic bodily functions with sufficient competence to deceive the world's media.

Despite their best efforts the Death of Diana was simply unable to survive in a world where the French police, the British police, a British coroner, Lord Stevens and anyone with a more than passing acquaintance with reality could find no evidence to support a conspiracy theory. It is believed that it was this realisation that drove one of those behind the resurrection attempts to flee with the Death's remains through the busy streets of fantasy land, where a sudden collision with the banal tragedy of reality was to lead to the death of the Death of Diana.

The Death of Diana was buried on Thursday morning. In a moving state ceremony, buried alongside it were several pieces of bad news for the British government, including the decision to drop the SFO inquiry into the Al Yamama arms deal , the axing of thousands of rural post offices and the questioning of Tony Blair by police in relation to the cash for peerages affair.

The Death of Diana was mourned by Mohamed Al Fayed, the Daily Express, Elton John and millions of people who should really find more important things to fill their lives. The Death of Diana is survived by the Death of JFK, the Death of Elvis and the Death of Sanity.

Paul Burrell's Link To Reality 1958-2006

Doctors at the St Diana Hospital for the Self-Deluded have confirmed that former Royal Butler Paul Burrell's Last Link To Reality passed away this week. Although reports from the hospital remain unclear it appears that The Link - which had been in poor health for many years - entered a coma early on Sunday after a brief, seventeen-hour, chat with Mr Burrell himself about the former butler's deep and abiding love for Diana, Princess of Wales and how much he meant to her.

The product of a childhood in a coal-mining village in the North of England, The Link spent much of its troubled life in Mr Burrell's company. When he first joined the Royal staff, The Link decided to go with him, taking it upon itself to listen to young Paul's tales of Royal goings-on while quietly reminding him of his position - at that time Third Under-Footstool-In-Waiting.

The relationship between the pair became more difficult in 1987, when Mr Burrell was appointed butler to the Prince and Princess of Wales. With Mr Burrell spending much of his time in the glare of the media spotlight (even if only at the very edge of that glare and usually concealed beneath the princess's shopping), The Link found itself seeing less and less of its old friend. Things worsened still following the Royal divorce when - apparently prompted by an offhand remark from Diana - Mr Burrell spent several months believing he was a rock.

Following Diana's death, The Link's attempts to see Mr Burrell became ever more infrequent. Soon it became content to sit at home, watching its old friend as he chose to maintain a quiet and dignified silence by selling his story to the world and eating kangaroo testicles on ITV 'reality' programme "I'm A Nonentity - Get Me Out of Here".

Soon The Link's health began to fail, even as Mr Burrell was finding a new role for himself as keeper of a private museum containing a surprisingly large assortment of Diana's property and as defender of the princess's reputation against all those who might wish to do her wrong, such as her own children.

The Link is survived by the only person on this Earth who ever really knew and understood Diana.