More Scandal for Britain's Royals?
L O N D O N, Nov. 10 -- It's a potentially explosive royal scandal, but in a bizarre battle involving the courts, the media, the royal family as well as current and former royal staffers, the British public is not allowed to know what's it's all about — except that Prince Charles says it did not happen.
A long-brewing storm of an alleged incident between a "senior royal" and a royal servant turned into a tempest in recent days when the British press announced it would reveal the details of what it promised were particularly shocking allegations.
Their efforts, however, were obstructed last week when a former personal aide to Charles was granted a legal injunction preventing a British paper from revealing the details of a story he claimed to be libelous.
And in a bizarre twist, Charles made the unprecedented move of issuing a statement identifying himself as the royal in question, but denying the allegations.
With British papers obeying the court injunction, the public was then informed that their future king had dismissed as "totally untrue" an allegation they were not allowed to read about.
'Charles and His Valet'
Not that the British public remains wholly ignorant about the details of the latest royal scandal.
In a front page headline over the weekend, the Mail on Sunday promised the "World Exclusive — Charles and His Valet: The True Story." Inside the tabloid, however, the story remained shrouded in innuendo and rumor, whispering tales of an alleged incident between Charles and one of his servants.
The sequence of events leading up to the media frenzy that is now giving Buckingham Palace a royal headache are long-winded and confusing, but the basis of the story is this: before the Mail on Sunday published its story, a former senior aide to Charles was granted a court injunction preventing the article from being published.
The Guardian newspaper then decided to name Michael Fawcett as the former royal aide who took out the injunction. But lawyers for The Guardian stressed in court that the newspaper, "never intended to publish the Mail on Sunday's claims," and that it had "no reason to believe them to be true."
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