Comedy and Terror
VIEWPOINT
By Eldon Griffiths
London. Many’s the time I’ve visited Windsor Castle on official business, as a member of Parliament and government under-secretary, but never once did I pass through the gates that lead to its inner keep, let alone to the royal apartments, without being subjected to what Scotland Yard regards as the world’s best security system outside the White House.
How different was the experience of Aaron Barshak, a stand-up comedian with a long record of disrupting public events, who recently gate-crashed the most sought-after royal event of the year, grabbed a microphone out of the hands of the queen’s grandson, Prince William, and stunned a crowd of Britain’s top socialites, including her husband, Prince Philip, their eldest son and heir, Prince Charles, and the third, fourth, fifth and sixth in line to the British throne, by letting loose with a stream of off-color jokes and come-ons for a vaudeville show.
How did he do it? Simple. Barshak, who bills his act “The Comedy Terrorist,” took advantage of William’s 2lst birthday party, at which the bare-chested prince played bongo drums in a loincloth and his guests were commanded to appear in African fancy dress. Changing in the toilet of the nearby Highlander pub, Barshak appeared in front of the castle wearing a pink ball gown, a turban and false beard, shouting, “I am Osama Bin Laden.” The crowd roared as he lifted his skirt to reveal what he described as the “underbelly of the world” and a second beard, which was hanging from a G-string, that he called the “heir” to the throne.
Amused, the police moved him on. They were far too busy handling the massed ranks of cameramen shooting pictures of Prince William’s guests,dressed as lions, Masai warriors and Congolese chieftains as they arrived in their limos at the main Henry Vlll entrance,to worry about a “nutter.” Barshak doffed his false beard and ball gown, packed them into a rucksack, then scooted unobserved through the garden of St. George’s school, which runs up to the castle ramparts. Scaling two walls, he climbed a tree and hopped over the castle’s outer wall as darkness fell. He then changed back into his Bin Laden rig and told the first guard he met that he was one of the prince’s guests who had drunk too much champagne, left the party for a breath of fresh air and gotten lost in the maze of medieval buildings that separate the outer part of the castle from the inner keep.
Persuaded by his getup and eloquence, a kindly member of the royalty protection squad escorted Barshak to the royal ballroom where at 11:20 p.m. he jumped onto the stage, shouldered aside Prince William and tipsily addressed the queen and her bewildered guests.
Some tittered, others frowned, but no one moved until Osama bin Barshak stepped off the stage and headed for the bar, demanding more champagne. Only then did the penny drop.
Wrestled to the floor by heavily armed bodyguards, the Comedy Terrorist was arrested, stripped of his gown and both beards and hustled to the nearest jail.
At first, most Britons laughed as Scotland Yard apologized and the tabloids splashed the story. But two days later, as Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, arrived for a state visit to Britain, the embarrassed police and a worried government recognized that the Comedy Terorist, who was not searched before he joined the prince’s party, might easily have carried a bomb that could have wiped out the royal family. Anxious questions began. “Heads will roll,” the home secretary told Parliament when it also emerged that the police commander in charge of royalty protection was none other than the seventh earl of Rossyln, one of the few remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords.
Which brings me to my own more modest experiences of the business of protecting heads of state in an open democracy.
One of these was in the l970s, when an IRA bomb killed the queen’s cousin, Lord Mountbatten, while he was fishing. Another was when an intruder climbed into Buckingham palace and woke the queen when he entered her bedroom at 2 a.m. Amazingly, she kept her nerve and kept him chatting until help came.
Then there was the IRA terrorists’ bombing of the Conservative party’s annual conference in Brighton, which nearly killed Margaret Thatcher and did kill three of her aides. Prime Minister John Major was lucky to survive when mortar bombs were fired into Number l0 Downing Street in the mid l980s. An attack killed two Indian prime ministers, Indira Gandhi and her successor, Rajiv Gandhi, and yet another wrecked my club in London, coming close to killing my wife.
Following these and other attacks, the police and security services undertook exhaustive investigations. Lessons were learned, security tightened, and I played a small part in writing new antiterrorist laws. The increased vigilance may have reduced the dangers, somewhat. Yet no amount of increased manpower or better training or tougher laws or higher expenditure can eliminate the risks that go with the jobs of those who serve in high office,unless, as happens in dictatorships, we fence them off from the people they serve. Which means in open democracies that they give up working the crowds, pressing the flesh or, as in young Prince William’s case, throwing a party for their friends.
And that, in my opinion, is too high a price to pay.
Griffiths, a resident of Laguna Niguel, is an author, lecturer, journalist and former member of the British House of Commons.
