Camilla's Good Point-Not An Underware Model "The Times" June 15, 2000

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June 15 2000 EUROPE

Playboy princes keep mothers awake

BY ROGER BOYES

BEARDED and hungry, Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark returned home
yesterday from four months in the Arctic wilderness to confront the
question of his great wavering princely "ancestor", to be or not to be.
"It's going to be very strange to be back in Copenhagen," said the 32-
year-old Prince who before his trek in northern Greenland enjoyed a
reputation as something of a playboy in the Danish capital. "I haven't
decided how long I will stay there."

There could be no more disturbing news for his long-suffering mother,
Queen Margrethe, who has been planning an orderly succession. The
Prince, a keen marathon runner, has been groomed for the throne with
stints of military service, study at Harvard and a post in the Danish
Embassy in Paris.

Plainly, like Hamlet, he is uneasy in his role, having been exposed to
nothing but ice, snow and sledge dogs since early spring. His immediate
plan is not to become king but rather to take his pilot's licence. For
Danes, eager for change, that smacks of an identity crisis.

The comparison with Hamlet is admittedly thin. It was a bit odd to
leave court for four months ("I'm looking forward to making friends
with huskies," he said before departure) but not quite in the Hamlet
league of madness. There seems to be no murder plan.

Queen Margrethe, however, showed determination worthy of Hamlet's
mother by flying out to the Arctic to give him coffee and cakes,
apparently nervous that Prince Frederik was not eating properly. Since
the whole point of the expedition was to prove his manhood, that left
the Crown Prince sorely embarrassed.

Prince Frederik's adventure does highlight the problem of all
continental crown princes. They are young, sometimes clever, men
watching their contemporaries making fortunes in the e-economy. They,
in the meantime, have to kick their heels waiting for their parents to
make space on the throne.

There was some consolation from Prince Frederik's attentive mother
yesterday after he touched down in Copenhagen: he will have an
unpopulated patch of northern Greenland named after him. The Queen also
pinned a medal to his chest. Prince Frederik, still complaining about
the food in Greenland, then went off to have a square meal.

The doyen of crown princes is naturally the Prince of Wales whose
serious pursuits underline the generational differences: unlike the
playboy princes across the Channel, he has been married and has
fathered two sons. He is still no closer to the throne, however, than
the likes of Prince Haakon Magnus of Norway, 26, or Prince Willem-
Alexander of The Netherlands, 33.

The stories of these restless continental princes are similar. With a
chronic shortage of acceptable royal brides, they are tending to delay
marriage and trawl nightclubs for distraction. They seem to have a
strong preference for models. Prince Haakon Magnus was sent to work in
the United Nations when his parents, King Harald and Queen Sonja,
became concerned about his relationship with the model, Mona Woll
Haland. Crown Prince Felipe in Spain has taken a fancy to a Norwegian
underwear model, Eva Sannum.

Prince Frederik, before taking up with huskies, was friends with an
underwear model, Katja Stokholm Nielsen, moved on to a pop singer,
Maria Montell, and seems now to be in a liaison with a 24-year-old
fashion student.

Prince Nicolaos of Greece does not have a throne to inherit - the
family have lived in exile since 1967 - but he shares the peer
preference for Scandinavian models. For three years he was a friend to
Sofie Egmont-Petersen from Copenhagen. Prince Albert of Monaco also has
a liking for the fashion runways.

There is some parental concern about this trend. "Elder sons are
behaving like second sons and that should not be allowed to continue,"
one Scandinavian court watcher said yesterday. The troubled love life
of Crown Prince Willem-Alexander shows how delicate the dilemma has
become. Queen Beatrix found herself the target of the Dutch press which
accused her of killing the four-year love affair between her son and
the commoner, Emily Brewers. "Will Emily be the Dutch Camilla?" asked a
Dutch magazine after reporting that the dentist's daughter had to be
smuggled into the palace through side doors and was cold-shouldered at
court balls. The Queen's main concern was probably not that Miss
Brewers was a commoner but that she was a Catholic, which spelt trouble
for the Protestant House of Orange.

She was well liked by the Dutch and a stable and sensible, if shy,
counterpart to the bubbly playboy Prince.

The Dutch fear is that the problems of the House of Windsor could be
exported over the North Sea to the House of Orange. That seems to have
been sufficient for Queen Beatrix to stop the affair. Now Prince Willem-
Alexander is consoling himself with an Argentine banker, Maxima
Zorreguita, 28. She is not entirely uncontroversial because her father
was a minister under the Galtieri regime. She too is a Catholic.

Mothers wanting a smooth succession are thus doomed to be
disciplinarians as their sons drift through discotheques in the long
wait for the throne. When Queen Margrethe discouraged Frederik from his
relationship with Maria Montell, crowds gathered outside the palace and
chanted: "Margrethe, let your son marry."

Prince Frederik told an interviewer defiantly: "I am the one who will
decide on my private life. There's no law that says I have to marry
blue blood. I'm sure that I will choose a woman I love." This fighting
talk was somewhat undermined by the Queen's mercy mission to the Arctic
Circle.

By comparison, the British succession dilemmas, though filling acres of
newsprint, seem minor, or at least manageable. Camilla Parker Bowles is
not Catholic, not a future monarch's mother, and not an underwear
model.

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