Quote of the Day

There’s a class war going on in the UK with middle class girl Kate Middleton expected to marry Prince William at some point. And apparently she has an uncle who’s so crass that it reads like some sort of wacky fish-out-of-water film starring Rob Schneider. Interesting look at British culture though.

If his glamorous niece weren’t expected to marry Britain’s Prince William, Gary Goldsmith might just be another cocaine-snorting, tattooed, embarrassing uncle.

But when an undercover video last week showed Goldsmith, 49, cutting lines of cocaine in “La Maison de Bang Bang” — the villa he owns on the Spanish isle of Ibiza — his oh-so-unregal lifestyle became headlines — and a scandal steeped in the crass issue of class.

Goldsmith is the brother of the mother of Kate Middleton, who started dating William eight years ago when they met at St. Andrews University in Scotland. Ever since, there has been discussion about whether this “commoner,” now a 27-year-old accessories-buyer-turned-photography-student, was good enough for the heir to the British throne.

Much attention has focused on Goldsmith’s two divorces, familiarity with prostitutes, and the hard-core porn he is said to enjoy on his 52-inch TV.

As the Daily Mail explained, he even named his villa La Maison de Bang Bang, which, it said, was “crude French slang for House of Sex.”

Class in Britain is roughly equivalent to race in America — despite enormous strides toward equality, social standing simmers never far below the surface. “Yes, I think class is the primary element in all this,” said Robert Lacey, a prominent royal biographer. Britain has become more of a meritocracy, and nowadays a member of the royal family can “dip into the gene pool of the proletariat,” he said, in contrast with the old days of arranged marriages with other foreign highborns. But marrying above and below one’s station still brings “enormous fascination and envy. . . . Class is still a big issue.

“There you are in America wondering whether President Obama should get involved in this matter with a black professor and a police officer. . . . It’s a minor matter consuming you in the way we are getting consumed by this subject.”

[via, thanks Thiago for the tip]

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