Saudi Prince Quizzed Over Murder of Servant 'Who Slept at Foot of Master's Bed'
MAIL ONLINE: Detectives are continuing to question a Saudi prince over his servant's murder as new details about their relationship become known.

Sources have compared it to a master and servant relationship and it has emerged that the aide may have slept on the floor at the foot of his master's bed.

The prince has been held on suspicion of killing the man at the Landmark Hotel in Central London.

Scotland Yard detectives have also seized CCTV footage of an alleged assault by the 33-year-old multi-millionaire on his aide in a hotel lift last month.

Officers are examining the possibility that the servant was the subject of regular abuse from his master. >>> | Thursday, February 18, 2010

Saudi Royal Under Police Investigation After His Servant Is Found Battered to Death in London Hotel
MAIL ONLINE: A member of the Saudi royal family is being quizzed by police on suspicion of murder tonight after one of his servants was found battered to death at a top London hotel.

Police were called to the five-star Landmark Hotel in Marylebone after a 32-year-old man was battered to death in one of the hotel's luxury suites.

The victim, a Saudi Arabian man believed to be part of the royal's entourage, suffered severe head injuries in the attack.

Tonight detectives were quizzing a wealthy man in his 30s who told them he was a member of the Saudi Arabian royal family.

It is thought that the unnamed royal had not claimed diplomatic immunity following his arrest on Monday evening.

Paramedics were called to a third floor room of the hotel at 4.45pm on Monday, but they found the man was already dead. >>> Rebecca Camber | Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Opinion —
Johann Hari: Gin, Servants and Bloodlines for Royalty's Alf Garnett in a Tiara
THE INDEPENDENT: To be fair to her, the Queen Mother did do one thing well. She supported far-right politics

It must be exhausting to be a monarchist, forever finding ways to pretend a family of cold, talentless snobs are better than the rest of us. They have to make gold out of mud. The system of monarchy – selecting a head of state solely because of the womb they passed through, and surrounding them with sycophants from the moment they emerge – produces warped and dim people and demands that we scrape before them. What's a poor monarchist to do? They can only lavish a thick cream of adjectives – "dignity", "charm", "majesty" – over the Windsor family in the hope that some of us are fooled.

This process corrupts even the most intelligent monarchists. A strange case study is the new, authorised, 1,000-plus pages biography of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (the "Queen Mother") by William Shawcross. He is a smart man: his study of the secret bombing of Cambodia by Henry Kissinger is extraordinary. Yet as a monarchist he has an impossible task. He has to present a cruel, bigoted snob who fleeced millions from the British taxpayer as a heroine fit to rule over us. His mind turns to mush. Before the real Bowes-Lyon is lost in a frenzy of royalist rimming, we should remember who she really was: more Imelda Marcos than the good fairy Glinda.

By the time she died, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was treating the British Treasury – our tax money – as her personal piggy bank, with her bills running way beyond the millions she was allotted every year. Even the ultra-Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont complained that "she far exceeds her Civil List and the Treasury gets very het up about it". She used the money to pay for 83 full-time staff, including four footmen, two pages, three chauffeurs (what do they do, split her into three parts for transportation?), a private secretary, an orderly, a housekeeper, five housemaids... the list goes on and on. She even insisted that it was a legitimate use of public funds to maintain a full-time "Ascot office", whose job was to do nothing but keep a register of members of the Royal Enclosure and send them entry vouchers. >>> Johann Hari | Friday, September 25, 2009