Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee celebrations look set to be overshadowed by Prince Andrew’s sexual abuse lawsuit and Prince Harry’s memoir.
The 95-year-old monarch marks 70 years on the throne in February 2022 and there will be celebrations throughout the year in Britain.
The centerpiece will be a long, four day weekend at the start of June when there will be a U.K. public holiday on Thursday and Friday.
Queen Elizabeth II visits Manchester Cathedral on July 8, 2021 in Manchester, England. Her Platinum Jubilee year could be dominated by Prince Andrew’s sexual abuse lawsuit and anticipation of Prince Harry’s memoir.
Five thousand people led by a giant dragon the size of a London bus will march through London to end the four-day bonanza.
However, the festivities could be overshadowed by two separate scandals from opposite sides of America.
On the East Coast, Virginia Giuffre’s sexual assault and battery lawsuit against Prince Andrew is due in the middle of 2022, her attorney David Boies told Sky News Wednesday.
Giuffre alleges she was trafficked to Prince Andrew by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in 2001, and made to have sex with him when she was just 17 years old.
If the civil case gets to court in New York, it will almost certainly hang over Elizabeth during the year of celebrations and there is even the possibility court hearings will coincide with the main events over June 2 to June 5.
On the West Coast, Prince Harry’s memoir is currently due for publication at the end of 2022, with royal watchers expecting an onslaught against Prince Charles and the Monarchy.
The Duke of Sussex is reportedly working with ghost writer J.R. Moehringer, who according to Robbie Millen, literary editor of U.K. newspaper The Times, may have “daddy issues.”
The Pulitzer Prize winning novelist also ghost wrote Andre Agassi’s autobiography Open, and a review in The Guardian reported how in the book: “Nobody, however, wounds Andre like his dad.”
Moehringer’s own memoir The Tender Bar is about his search for a male role model in the absence of his missing father, described in publicity material as “a DJ who disappeared before JR spoke his first words.”
The queen’s official birthday parade, Trooping the Colour, on Thursday, June 2, 2022, will see the royals gather on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for a parade and air force fly past.
However, the royals have a dilemma about whether to invite Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to join them.
If they do, they risk cementing Harry’s status as an accepted and in the fold member of the royal family right when he may be poised to launch new attacks on them.
However, if they reject the first British royals of color in living memory, they risk lending weight to any allegations of racism that may be contained within the book.
Historian Robert Lacey, author of Battle of Brothers, previously told Newsweek the royals need to mend their rift with Harry and Meghan in time for the jubilee in 2022.
He said: “If we’re looking for an ultimate deadline for the rift to be resolved, it’s who goes on the balcony next summer. If the mixed races Sussexes are not on the balcony, that would surely be, not a fatal blow, but a pretty disastrous blow to the credibility of the royal family in multi-racial Britain and with a multi-racial Commonwealth.”
“Ultimately,” he continued, “Meghan must realize that it’s in her interests to be there because she and Harry must acknowledge that the ultimate source of their celebrity is their royalness. She was a successful actress but she would not have appeared on Oprah if she was not married to Harry.
“If Harry or she shift from the role of royal critic or rebel into actual outcast and become like a modern day Duke and Duchess of Windsor, will Netflix renew their contract? There’s a complexity there that has to be resolved. So on both sides it makes sense in the long term to reconcile. The long term would seem to be that balcony next year.”
