In a spectacle that would make Gibbon weep, the son of Norway's crown princess finds himself remanded in custody, awaiting a verdict on charges of rape. The irony is so thick you could carve it with a Viking axe. Here we have a nation that prides itself on progressive enlightenment, yet its royal family is mired in the same sordid scandals that plagued the Bourbons.
The boy, Marius Borg Høiby, is not even a direct heir to the throne, but his proximity to power has not shielded him from the long arm of the law. One might recall the words of Tacitus: 'The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.' Norway's legal system, perhaps overeager to prove its virtue, has now ensnared a royal.
But this is not justice; it is the slow rot of an institution that has lost its moral compass. The crown princess, Mette-Marit, must now navigate the treacherous waters between maternal instinct and public duty. Her son, a product of a previous marriage, was never meant for the throne, yet he carries its curse.
The tabloids will feast on this, as they always do, while the intelligentsia tut-tut about the failures of modern parenting. But the real lesson here is that no amount of social democracy can inoculate a family against the hubris of entitlement. The verdict will come, and with it, a verdict on the Norwegian monarchy itself.
Can it survive another blow to its already tarnished image? Or will it, like the Romanovs, crumble under the weight of its own decadence? Watch this space, dear reader, for the saga of the crown princess's son is but a symptom of a deeper malady: the intellectual and moral decadence of our age.
