What Prince Andrew’s mess means for Beatrice’s wedding
Thanks to her father’s recent interview, Princess Beatrice’s big day is now set to look very different to what she once imagined. Better get thee to a registry office instead, writes Katy Hall.
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As anyone who has ever made it down the aisle can attest, planning a wedding royally sucks.
Yes, it affords you the chance to marry the person you love and get roaringly drunk surrounded by the people you love, but the logistics of making your big day come to pass without losing your mind or alienating every sane person around you in the process is seriously hard work.
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You have to consider things like venues, weather conditions, travel for interstate and international guests, decades-long sensitivities between distant relatives, dietary requirements, seating arrangements, table settings, cake flavours, first dance music, last dance music, sourcing something borrowed, something blue, something old and something new. And in some instances like at my own wedding last year, polyamorist gangs.
If you’re Princess Beatrice, who is in the midst of planning her wedding to Italian property developer Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, things are even harder than they would be for us mere mortals.
In addition to her grandmother being the Queen of England and her grandfather being a casual racist, the mother of the bride is best known for having her toes sucked by a Texan oil tycoon, and the father of the bride is copping backlash over a disastrous interview relating to his friendship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. And that’s just her side of the family. God only knows what Mozzi’s got going on.
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In all seriousness, who knew you could feel so sorry for someone belonging to one of the wealthiest families in the world? Even with the money, palaces and chapels, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would want to trade places with Princess Beatrice at the moment.
Can you imagine if, even prior to the allegations against him resurfacing (which Prince Andrew denies), she had hoped to forgo tradition and walk down the aisle on her own? Now, if she doesn’t she’s committing the ultimate mark of shame against her dad, and if she does, she’s suggesting that she supports him no matter what may be true.
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To add insult to injury, her father has not only been stood down from royal duties, but also booted out of his Buckingham Palace digs.
It really does have all the markings of a Hollywood blockbuster. Or, depending on how you look at it, a Greek tragedy.
“By royal standards, it’ll be a relatively low key wedding,” royal expert Joe Little says of the upcoming nuptials.
Where last year her younger sister, Princess Eugenie, had a fully-televised wedding ceremony, carriage procession through Windsor and celebrations that spanned days either side of the main event, at this rate Beatrice will be lucky to score Prince George as a misbehaving page boy.
“Andrew and Fergie played a large part in the planning of Eugenie’s wedding and wanted it to be as big an event as possible. He is perceived to be the Queen’s favourite son and has been for some time, and I think with Eugenie, Andrew asked for a big wedding and got it. But it’s hard to imagine that happening now,” Little says.
“At this stage we assume the wedding will be in the spring of 2020 and that it will be done at a venue where the Queen can be present. But the Queen is pretty pragmatic about these things. If it would help everybody else out she wouldn’t attend, but I think the arrangements will be made that she can attend.”
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Perhaps the best thing to do now would be for Princess Beatrice and Mozzi to simply nick off on their lunch breaks to the Windsor town hall Charles and Camilla opted for with their 2005 wedding and break it to everyone after the fact.
But something tells me that royal princesses and millionaire developers don’t have lunch breaks like the rest of us. Or worry about things like who gets the chicken and who gets the beef, for that matter. Then again, Pizza Express could always do the catering.