"A case of the haves and have yachts"

 

 

John F. Burns 

 

 

 

On its face, it sounded like a gift to Britain's absurdist school of satire:

A Conservative Minister, close to Prime Minister David Cameron, suggested that the country, teetering on the edge of a new recession, its politics racked by 2.5 million unemployed people and harsh public spending cuts, give Queen Elizabeth II, one of the world's richest women, a gift of well, er, a yacht. And no ordinary yacht: a $90 million, high-masted, oceangoing yacht with staterooms and polished brass and a crisply uniformed crew to pipe Her Majesty aboard.

A what?

Yes, a yacht a new royal yacht, to replace the one taken from the queen and her family by Tony Blair's government and sent into retirement as a dockside tourist attraction in Edinburgh as the Labour Party set out to show there was a new, more populist management in town in 1997. A new yacht that would allow the 85-year-old monarch and other royal dignitaries to ply the seas as they once did, making nearly 700 overseas visits in more than 40 years aboard the 380-foot Royal Yacht Britannia.

The idea of a replacement dropped incongruously into the public domain Monday, courtesy a leaked copy of a letter written by the Education Minister, Michael Gove, and published in The Guardian. Mr. Gove's idea was that a new yacht would be a fitting way for the nation to mark the queen's 60th anniversary on the throne, her Diamond Jubilee, which falls on Feb. 6. That was the day in 1952 when Princess Elizabeth, visiting a game park in Kenya, acceded to the throne on the death of her father, King George VI.

The jubilee will be marked by nationwide celebrations in June, including a four-day public holiday, a Thames river pageant, massed parades and the lighting of beacons across the country. There has been nothing like it since Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth's great-great-grandmother, marked her Diamond Jubilee, somewhat grumpily, in 1897. The government hopes that the 2012 version, coming ahead of the London Olympic Games beginning in July, will lift morose spirits as Britain endures its worst economic times since the 1930s.

But there will be no new yacht.

Mr. Gove, a cerebral former journalist for The Times of London who is regarded as one of Mr. Cameron's most effective Ministers, with a radical programme to renew Britain's schools, has been reproached at times for what his critics have called a political tin ear. The yacht proposal followed others that have caused uproar, from school closings to plans to make it easier to fire bad teachers. It seemed to matter little, at least to those who reacted with gleeful mockery to Mr. Gove's idea for a new yacht to mark the jubilee with something less “transient” than palace shindigs and street parties, that he never suggested taxpayers should pay for the new boat.

The contrary, in fact. In his leaked letter to Jeremy Hunt, the Minister heading the jubilee celebrations, Mr. Gove acknowledged that “we should be clear that no public funding is available for the project, as this would not be appropriate in the current financial climate”. It was a point willfully overlooked by Labour Party politicians and an army of bloggers who spent the day in what amounted to a mass political flogging of Mr. Gove. Even Mr. Cameron's chief partner in the coalition government, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, a Liberal Democrat, joined in. It was a case, he said, of the “haves and have yachts”.

After reacting initially in the manner of scalded cats, calling the idea quite out of keeping with the times, Mr. Cameron's Downing Street aides came to Mr. Gove's rescue by saying that, actually, the Minister might be on to something. They said the Prime Minister strongly supported the idea of a new royal yacht but one, they noted with a wary eye to the public gallery, that would be financed by private donations and that could double as a training ship for naval cadets from underprivileged backgrounds.

The queen said nothing. Some members of the royal family, including Prince Charles, heir to the throne, are said to have lobbied quietly for a new yacht. The queen herself was seen shedding a tear as she left the Britannia for the last time in 1997, becoming the first monarch since the mid-17th century to have to do without her own yacht. She was notably absent when other members of the Royal Family rented the Britannia as anybody now can, for as much as $390 a head for a dinner in the old state dining room, served just as it was in the queen's days for a party last summer before the wedding of her granddaughter Zara to Mike Tindall, who was then England's rugby captain. — New York Times News Service