The heir to the Dutch throne, Amalia, princess of Orange, came of age last week in the middle of a pandemic that has claimed tens of thousands of lives in the Netherlands – and learned one invaluable lesson for the future as she did so.
That lesson was not, alas, that all citizens are in the same lamentable boat when it comes to coronavirus. On the contrary. It was that while there’s one set of rules for the great mass of the public, there’s another much more flexible set for the royal family and its friends.
While the country had just extended a pre-Christmas “partial lockdown” where households were restricted to four visitors, the royal family issued formal invitations to 21 guests to attend a “last-minute” birthday party in the well-screened grounds of Huis ten Bosch palace.
It’s no good thing to be too po-faced about a gang of giddy 18 year olds setting out to enjoy themselves for a few hours. Privilege is not a crime. The problem is that the royal family has plenty of form on this – and the resources to know and do much better.
Does anyone believe that when the decision was taken to throw open the palace gates to Amalia’s closest pals, nobody remembered there was a pandemic raging outside – and that the precautions in place on and off for almost two years might just apply to them as well?
And if they were in any doubt – which it’s hard to imagine they could have been – did they not think to inquire, just for form’s sake? It makes no sense at all.
Mounting deaths
That being so, there’s only one other option: they decided to take a punt and hope they wouldn’t get caught, safe in the knowledge that if they did get caught they could shrug their shoulders, say a sotto voce “sorry”, and ask the prime minister to get them off the hook.
Which is exactly what happened – and not for the first time.
The first royal gaffe of the pandemic dates to August 2020 when the country was reeling from the shock, businesses were worried about survival, and deaths were already mounting.
That was when Amalia's parents, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima, flew to their Greek compound in the Aegean to try out their new speedboat reputed to have cost €2 million. The paparazzi were on standby and the papers were full of it the next day.
If that was simply poor taste, the next Greek gaffe a few weeks later was more serious.
The royal couple were photographed with the owner of a busy restaurant on the tiny island of Miklos – without social distancing and without wearing masks. They apologised on Twitter. They had been “caught up in the spontaneity of the moment”.
Something similar must have happened in October when the royals again flew to Greece with their three daughters, Amalia, Alexia and Ariane, for a half-term break when the strong advice of the government was against all unnecessary foreign travel.
The family left the Netherlands on a Friday and were outed by the media almost immediately, so that they flew back on Saturday. Television news that evening showed their convoy returning to the palace in darkness.
Trust ‘betrayed’
Remarkably, what didn’t become clear for another 24 hours was that two of the girls stayed in Greece to continue their holiday and didn’t return until the following Tuesday. That too was rumbled, and Willem-Alexander and Maxima, like naughty children, were forced to make a video statement in which the king said: “It hurts to have betrayed the people’s trust.”
The people responded. An Ipsos poll showed confidence in the monarch plummeting at the end of 2020 from 76 per cent in April to just 47 per cent in December.
Restraint, however, only lasted until June, when the king was upbraided by ministers for flouting social distancing rules while meeting football fans before a match between the Netherlands and Austria. As one news website put it: "Oops, he's done it again . . . "
And so, true to form, the king and queen arranged an 18th birthday party for Amalia last week – throwing the unfortunate young heir into the public spotlight for all the wrong reasons and teaching her a lesson she will hopefully one day unlearn.
Arguably worse, however, was creating yet another farce in which prime minister Mark Rutte – dealing with the growing threat of Omicron – was forced to clean up after them, wearily observing about the party: "The king informed me that with hindsight it was not such a good idea."
Indeed, your highness.
