So a Norwegian crown princess’s son is in custody, awaiting a rape verdict, with British legal experts peering over the Nordic fjords like anthropologists at a tribal ritual. The story drips with the sort of ironies that would make Juvenal weep. Here we have a scion of a constitutional monarchy, a family that once symbolised the sturdy, Lutheran virtues of thrift and duty, now tangled in the same sordid web that has ensnared sports stars, Hollywood producers and sundry members of the global elite. The Norwegians, those paragons of social democratic order, find themselves confronting the oldest of aristocratic vices: unaccountable privilege and its attendant moral rot.
Let us not pretend this is an isolated incident. The saga of the crown princess’s son is merely the latest exhibit in a museum of decline. Recall the Victorians, who were obsessed with respectability yet whose upper classes wallowed in a miasma of hypocrisy. Or the late Roman Empire, where the sons of senators indulged in orgies while the barbarians sharpened their axes at the gates. Today’s equivalents are the offspring of the wealthy and powerful, cosseted by private schooling, shielded by legions of lawyers and PR handlers, and too often convinced that the rules apply to lesser mortals. The difference now is that the cameras are everywhere and the public, once deferential, has become a hungry beast that feeds on scandal.
The involvement of British legal experts is particularly telling. Why should British lawyers be observing a Norwegian case? Because the crime of rape, once a matter of family name and hushed-up settlements, has become a transnational spectacle. The legal profession, like the financial markets, has globalised. There is money in expertise, and there is also, one suspects, a frisson of Schadenfreude. The British, having endured their own parade of aristocratic scandal from Profumo to Savile to the Duke of York, now watch as their Scandinavian cousins tread the same grim path. It is the revenge of the periphery: you looked down on our tabloids, our class system, our tawdry royals. Now look at your own.
What does this say about national identity? Norway has long traded on a myth of purity: clean air, clean water, clean politics. The crown princess herself married a man who was once a drug addict and a convicted criminal, a story sold as a modern fairy tale of redemption. Yet that fairy tale now curdles. The son, whose name we shall not dignify with repetition, faces charges that strike at the heart of the Nordic welfare model. For if the system cannot protect the vulnerable from the entitled, what is it for? The fall of Icarus is always poignant, but when the wax melts over a fjord, it carries a peculiarly northern chill.
We should not, of course, presume guilt before the verdict. That would be un-British, un-Norwegian and unjust. But we can note the pattern. The adolescent prince was arrested on suspicion of rape in 2021, released, and then rearrested. The case has dragged on, a classic symptom of a legal system trying to balance the rights of the accused with the demands of the media and the victim. British observers will be noting the differences in procedure: the Norwegian tendency towards closed hearings, the reliance on psychological reports, the reluctance to name the defendant despite the obvious public interest. Compare that to the British courts, where anonymity for defendants is increasingly rare, and where the cross-examination of accusers has become a brutal art form.
Yet the real lesson is not legal but cultural. The crown princess’s son is a symbol of something rotten in the state of Norway. It is the same rot that infects all wealthy societies: the belief that status confers immunity, that the young must be protected from consequences, that the family name is a shield against the truth. The Victorians called it the ‘double standard’. The Romans called it ‘corruptio optimi pessima’: the corruption of the best is the worst. Norway was meant to be the best. Now it is simply another country with a sordid story, a princeling in a cell, and a nation asking itself how it came to this.
