The arrest of Marius Borg Høiby, son of Norway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit, on suspicion of rape has sent shockwaves through a nation that prides itself on egalitarian virtue. Yet the real scandal, the one that ought to make any Englishman choke on his Earl Grey, is the bureaucratic fumbling that has allowed this case to languish. British legal experts, themselves no strangers to judicial tardiness, have been quick to criticise the Norwegian authorities for the delay in delivering a verdict.
One might call this pot calling the kettle black, were it not for the fact that the entire Western legal apparatus seems to have succumbed to a kind of sclerotic paralysis. We live in an age of endless procedure, where justice is sacrificed on the altar of due process. Høiby, a 27-year-old with a history of drug abuse and violence, was remanded in custody on Thursday after an incident in Oslo.
The Crown Prince’s son, stepson to the heir to the throne, now sits in a cell while the world watches. But the question is not merely one of royal privilege. It is about the rot at the heart of our institutions.
Consider the parallels: the fall of Rome was not precipitated by barbarians at the gate, but by a slow decay of civic virtue and legal clarity. Here we have a man with a clear pattern of abusive behaviour, yet the wheels of justice grind with all the speed of a glacier. The Norwegian police, praised for their efficiency in handling last year’s stabbing spree in Kongsberg, now appear to be flummoxed by a case involving a member of the royal household.
The delay, they claim, is due to the complexity of the investigation. But complexity is the refuge of the incompetent. When the Roman Republic faced a crisis, they appointed a dictator.
We, in our decadent modernity, appoint committees and conduct reviews. The British legal experts, safe in their ivory towers, might do well to reflect on their own system, where rape convictions hover around a pathetic 2%. The truth is that the aristocracy of the West, whether royal or judicial, has lost its nerve.
They tremble before public opinion, hide behind anonymised accusers, and produce verdicts that satisfy no one. Høiby’s case is a microcosm of this failure. If he is guilty, he should be convicted swiftly.
If he is innocent, he should be released. But the prolonged uncertainty serves only to corrode trust in the very idea of justice. The monarchy, too, must answer.
King Harald V of Norway has largely remained silent, a wise move perhaps, but one that reinforces the perception that the crown is merely a decorative bauble. In Victorian times, the monarch was a moral exemplar. Today, they are embarrassed bystanders in their own family dramas.
The solution is not to abolish royalty, nor to speed up trials recklessly. It is to restore a sense of proportion and decisiveness. To remember that justice delayed is justice denied.
But that would require a return to intellectual and moral rigour, something our age seems incapable of providing. So we sit, watching the slow-motion trainwreck of a royal scion, while the legal experts tut-tut and the police shuffle papers. The barbarians are not at the gate; they are in the courtroom.
