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And even if the Queen really loved Britannia — her single tear at her decommissioning in 1997 certainly suggested this — she is unlikely, at 85, to want to spend any more time slurping around northern waters now, sitting, grim-faced and damply blanketed in a dripping, darkened hull, on a two-week holiday with 22 relatives and only one set of Boggle.
The whole thing reeks of a crazed panic buy. Gove clearly woke up in the middle of the night, thought, the Jubilee’s only months away, we still haven’t done anything, no one ever gets her anything really good, let’s get her a big flash boat! So off he rushed, and now he looks like the man at a 50th wedding anniversary who’s turned up with a massive leg of pork.
Men often panic with presents, or — worse — get all romantical, buying gooey, little-wifey offerings, like sandwich makers, pottery kits, ‘ironic’ jars for preserving. Faced with a seriously important woman, however, they go mouth-foamingly bonkers. For the silver jubilee, someone seriously suggested the Labour party get her a saddle; the palace is heaving with odd bric-a-brac, ‘lacrosse sticks, sunglasses, a pair of sandals, pineapples, eggs, a box of snail shells, a grove of maple trees, a dozen tins of tuna and 7kg of prawns’, according to her website. Thank God there’s no underwear — some men really think this is a great gift. Men like John Gage, the crepuscular billionaire Robert Redford played in Indecent Proposal.
I’m sure none of this stuff went through Michael Gove’s mind when he came up with his idea about the boat. Actually, he didn’t come up with it himself — universities minister David Willetts did. But if either of them knew anything about boats, they would steer clear. Yachts are vessels of misery, treachery, anger and despair. Jay Gatsby’s life was ruined the moment he saw Dan Cody’s yacht; a chance encounter that catapulted him aloft, and then laid him devastatingly low. The Hawaiian Tropic smile slid straight off Flavio Briatore’s face when Force Blue, a symbol of his prowling magnificence and the scene of many topless frolickings, was recently confiscated by the Italian tax police. When George Osborne succumbed to the lascivious glitter of Oleg Deripaska’s Queen K, slipping over to meet the oligarch with Peter Mandelson, he faced a scandal that nearly derailed him. And now there is a report that the captain of the Costa Concordia was lured onto the rocks because he wanted to show off to the boat’s head waiter, of all people.
David Cameron was instinctively horrified at the thought of a razzy megayacht — so Philip Green! But he changed his mind when he got letters from Princess Anne and Prince Charles, which is slightly bizarre, as if they had greater powers of persuasion than the fiercely intelligent, silver-tongued Gove. Anyway, he was also probably swayed by Gove’s idea for private funding, as well as the Daily Mail’s tireless campaign for a boat, which began last October and included diagrams of a kind of space-age Black Pearl they described as ‘romantic’. Unfortunately, Cameron is a romantic — just two days ago, he revealed in an interview that he and Sam have regular ‘date nights’ and that he can remember ‘every minute’ of his wedding night. So creepy! He really does sound like his life is decided by a weird committee.
Anyway, he supported the plan but there are still lots of practicalities that remain unaddressed. ‘Royal watcher’ Robert Hardman suggested the boat might also be used as a sort of ‘floating university’, which probably made the Queen’s heart sink. Gove is Education Secretary, but does this mean he might unexpectedly pop by, eyes shining with love, like all those minor MPs who still throw themselves at Margaret Thatcher? And then quite why anyone thinks a yacht can be built in time for the summer is equally baffling — the pharmaceuticals tycoon Ernesto Bertarelli had to wait more than two years for his latest plaything, an enormous ocean-going vajazzle he built for his wife Kirsty, a former beauty queen from Staffordshire. Rather off-puttingly, he called the £100 million boat the Vava II, which doesn’t sound very romantic to me. I mean, who is Vava I? Or should I say, whose is Vava I? Personally, I am hoping they will name the Queen’s ludicrous new toy the Austerity I. Certainly that will raise a tear in the eyes of the nation. Unlike a hospital, or a school, or anything else Gove’s friends could get for £60 million.
Camilla Long writes for the Sunday Times.
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