Norway’s crown princess has become embroiled in another scandal after newly unsealed files appeared to show her years of extensive contact with the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The latest tranche of Epstein files, released on Friday by the US justice department, appear to include nearly 1,000 mentions of the crown princess, Mette-Marit.
The files include scores of emails traded between the two, suggesting they were in contact from 2011 to 2014, the Norwegian daily VG reported. Mette-Marit married the future king of Norway in 2001.
The revelations come at a sensitive time for the royal family. The trial of Mette-Marit’s son, Marius Borg Høiby for rape is due to begin on Tuesday. He was born from a relationship before she married Crown Prince Haakon
Høiby is facing 38 charges, including the alleged rape of four women as well as alleged assault and drug offences. If convicted he could face up to 16 years in prison. Høiby has denied the most serious charges, including those of sexual abuse.
Well, I like vases. People like vases. Some vases being shitty doesn’t make ALL vases shitty.
And let’s not pretend like the “royal whatnot” upkeep is a major amount of money on a country’s scale. Sure, looking at it itself it seems like a lot, but removing, for example, the UK royal family in its entirety wouldn’t even be noticeable in the overall budget. They cost UK taxpayers around £510 million, whereas the 2025 budget spending was £1,244.9 billion. You’d lower it to £1,244.4 billion. That’s peanuts.
The issue - on that scale - isn’t the funding itself, it’s that the overall spending of taxpayer money is extremely inefficient.
Thank you for partaking in this conversation in good faith. This is a good conversation.
That being said, I absolutely hate that attitude. When you look at it as a percentage of annual spending you are right. When you look at it per capita you’re right, for the UK it’s only £7 per person if my math is right.
That perspective is an extremely privileged one. How many lives could be saved every year with that money? How much good could be done?
We agree that the overall spending and allocation of taxpayer money is inefficient. The difference that I see in this conversation is that you’re throwing up your hands and saying “the problem is too big, welp better not do anything about it”, while I’m saying “This is a great step in the right direction that can help people now”.
Can you give me some reasons to keep the royal family, rather than reasons not to get rid of it?
OK, let’s assume we do it your way - eliminate the entirety of the Royal Family funding, because they’re “useless”.
Let’s say the NHS is able to save 34 more lives per year (NHS 2025 budget is £204.7 billion, UK’s population is 69 million, the extra £510 million equates to just about enough money for 34 extra people - maths super simplified, ofc, but I think it’s good enough to show the scales we’re talking about).
Now - there’s a bunch of jobs some of the Royals do (representative, mostly) that now need to be done by others on a regular employment contract, but let’s ignore all that.
We get 34 extra lives saved after eliminating what is essentially a large piece of history and culture, large part of which is available to the public.
So… why stop there? Why not eliminate all museums? Bah, kill the entire DCMS - their budget was a whopping £2.29 billion for the 2025/26 financial year! That’s around 140 extra saved lives if that budget was pushed to NHS!
You see what I’m getting at?
Royal families in democratic monarchies often serve similar purposes as the president in countries like Germany or Poland. It’s the Chancellor/Prime Minister who has any actual power, but there’s still a mostly representative President. The president, other than being an extension of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also often has the power of veto (in the case of Poland: they can send a proposed to be analysed by the Constitutional Tribunal to verify legality), as part of the three-way checks and balances, and has the right of legislative initiative.
To my knowledge, all of this is also true about the UK King. Sure, they’re not electable, but clearly the people of UK don’t have a problem with that (approval rates in the 60s with only around 30% being strongly against).
The idea to “save lives” by eliminating a large chunk of culture and history, as well introducing the need to heavily reform how governance in the UK works (which usually means immense costs to implement) would be easier (and cheaper) to achieve by just reforming the NHS.
It’s the same case as in the US - it’s not the lack of money that’s the problem here. People always complain that US prefers financing their war industry than healthcare, but that’s just completely not true - their military gets around 4% of the federal budget while their healthcare gets 16%. Throwing more money at that bonfire won’t help save people - you need to start by putting the fire out and then cleaning up!
Cheers!