Well. I feel as if I have just binge-watched every single episode of Love Island while drinking Tia Maria and eating a family-sized pizza, a couple of boxes of Shapes and a value pack of Cadbury Favourites, in my PJ’s, at 3 in the afternoon while the dog licks the plates.
Reading Entitled has left me feeling deliciously soiled and tainted, with my lefty, anti-monarchist heart thoroughly uplifted and my basest voyeuristic impulses almost exhausted with overuse. What a great read!
It (almost) beggars belief. These two are such horrible people, in their different ways.
Andrew comes out of this as spoiled, lazy, boorish, greedy, dishonest, arrogant, extravagant and wasteful; a sexual user and abuser of women and girls and a man who’s prepared to cosy up with men in power – oligarchs, dictators, arms dealers, Arab royalty and the dodgy super-rich (example: Jeffrey Epstein) – because they flatter him and he can make money. He earned his nick-name of ‘Air Miles Andy’ because, in his role as a representative of British business, the public purse shelled out to fly him here, there and everywhere. On official business, of course, which often seemed to involve golf, prostitutes and making deals for his own enrichment. The story of Virginia Giuffre, with his lies and evasions and attempts to evade responsibility, is appalling and tragic.
The man is a criminal, and he’s been shielded from any kind of justice for his financial and sexual abuses by his royal status. Steam is now coming out of my ears, so I will move on to Sarah.
She seems just as greedy, extravagant and wasteful as Andrew, but with loads of energy and ambition and entrepreneurial dash. Needy, gullible, insecure, impulsive, the royal lifestyle did her no favours. Perhaps if she had not married into the royal family, she would have been a half-decent human. Who knows? No matter how much money she had, she overspent and so was always in debt – which made her not at all shy of dodgy business dealings and gifts from rich men (example: as above, Jeffrey Epstein), often in return for access to Andrew. But every time things fell apart (and they did, with monotonous regularity) she picked herself up and re-invented herself. Author, talk-circuit speaker, charity patron and fundraiser, businesswoman, Weight Watchers figurehead…she leveraged her royal status relentlessly, tastelessly and especially in the USA, very successfully.
That’s probably enough about the Yorks. I need to put out the rubbish and take a shower.
This post made me laugh out loud. Thank you for reading this book, so I don’t have to! What an unpleasant, shallow pair, though at least Sarah has some get-up-and-go to redeem her. I was always slightly touched that they stayed friends after their divorce and even shared a (presumably huge) house, but now I think they probably deserved each other! Andrew should be in jail.