The Norwegian royals that make Britain’s look mundane

It’s not hard to see why the ninety-three-year-old, wheelchair-bound Princess Astrid of Norway might feel that now is the moment to remind Norwegians “I can still be useful for something,” as she did in a rare interview last month. The princess, who is the sister of eighty-eight-year-old King Harald, was awarded an honorary pension by the government two decades ago; last year, her official diary shrank to twenty engagements. But 2024 was not kind to the Norwegian ruling house. More than once, the royal family was reduced to a single working member: Harald’s heir, Crown Prince Haakon. Norway’s monarchy, once notable for its remarkable popularity, is now beset by crises, including ill health, criminal proceedings and Meghan-and-Harry-style spoke-in-the-wheels stuff. Nonagenarian Princess Astrid could well find her offer taken seriously.

Slimmed-down monarchies, as Britain’s royal family has been forced to recognize, pose challenges every bit as tricky as their more bloated equivalents. Just how does a small team carry out a program of public engagements devised for a significantly longer batting order? At what point does a monarch’s illness prompt concern about the stability of the institution itself? And what’s the deal with state funding for a dwindling public presence?

In Britain’s case, the king could call on two reliable siblings, including his indefatigable sister the Princess Royal, as well as his son and those unshowy royal stalwarts the Gloucesters – the late queen’s youngest royal cousin and his Danish-born wife Birgitte. In Norway, Harald has a single surviving sibling, Princess Astrid, and no working royal cousins. Both he and his eighty-seven-year-old wife Queen Sonja have recently spent time in hospital. Last year, King Harald was fitted with a pacemaker and wound down the official duties he first reduced in 2006.

The death of his second cousin Elizabeth II in September 2022 made King Harald Europe’s oldest reigning monarch; he is also the oldest ruler in Norwegian history. Like Britain’s late queen, he has consistently denied that abdication is an option, saying last year: “I stick by what I’ve always said, that I swore an oath to the Storting [Norway’s parliament] and it is for life.” Norwegians’ response to such doggedness is not quite our own. In 2010, a poll found that almost 90 percent believed an elderly monarch troubled by ill health – exactly Harald’s position – ought to step down. Such is Harald’s personal popularity that his countrymen appear to have reviewed their position, with only a quarter of respondents in a recent poll calling for abdication. Yet support for this monarchy is markedly less than it was a decade ago.

Of Harald’s two children, Martha Louise is no longer a working royal, following her marriage to a bisexual American conspiracy theorist and shaman whom she claims she met in a past life in ancient Egypt. Neither of the king’s two royal grandchildren carries out engagements and his daughter-in-law, Crown Princess Mette-Marit, suffers from incurable pulmonary fibrosis, which restricts her public life as the wife of the heir to the throne.

As so often in the chronicles of modern monarchy, pesky misbehavior on the part of family members is the root of the problem. In Harald’s case, the chief culprits are Martha Louise and the troubled and trouble-prone son of Crown Princess Mette-Marit, Marius Borg Hoiby, born before her marriage to Crown Prince Haakon. In August last year, Borg Hoiby – whose father and maternal grandfather, the Crown Princess’s father, were both convicted felons – was arrested for assaulting a former girlfriend, including threatening to set alight her clothes. He became the first member of the Norwegian royal family to face criminal charges and, as his torrid story continues to unfold, he remains a thorn in the royals’ side. It also serves as a reminder to conservative Norwegians of the unorthodoxy of Mette-Marit’s background – her father’s second marriage was to a woman described alternatively as an exotic dancer or a stripper.

Martha Louise was once talked of as a possible bride for Prince Edward. Instead she chose a Norwegian author, Ari Behn. The couple had three daughters, and Behn published a series of books whose critical reception never quite matched that of the pre-Martha Louise short story collection on which his reputation had been based. During their marriage, Martha Louise, who claims clairvoyance and the ability to communicate with angels, set up an alternative health clinic and surrendered her royal highness status, while retaining her “princess” title. Behn and Martha Louise divorced in 2017; two years later, battling alcoholism and depression, Behn committed suicide.

In May 2019, Martha Louise made public a new relationship with Durek Verrett, a Californian who describes himself as a sixth-generation shaman. Verrett’s healing activities have been said to include exercises aimed at cleansing vaginas, in line with his belief that casual sex attracts subterranean spirits that impress themselves on the vaginal lining. At best, it’s not very royal. He also appears to subscribe to David Icke’s theory that the world is secretly run by shape-shifting reptilian humanoids. Unusually for adherents of the Icke theory, he counts himself as one of these alien lizards, sent to Earth to “shake up the system.”

If shaking up the system was his goal, there’s no doubt he succeeded. His wacky ideas – and his speaking tour with Martha Louise in which she ignored an agreement with her father to refrain from using her princess title in connection with money-making schemes – have been a recipe for disgruntlement. The monarchy was once so popular that Harald’s father, King Olav, claimed not to need protection in a country where all four million of his subjects were his bodyguards. But support for the royals dipped to its lowest point in Harald’s reign in the aftermath of Martha Louise’s marriage to Verrett last year, down to 62 percent from a high of 81 percent. Calls for Martha Louise to be stripped of her princess title are now widespread in the Norwegian press.

Happily, recent months have seen some signs of a royal comeback in the opinion polls. But without the children of the Crown Prince – second-in-line to the throne Princess Ingrid Alexandra and her younger brother Prince Sverre Magnus – taking on public duties, the problems of a shrinking royal firm will worsen. In the long term, only young blood and an appetite for visible public service can halt the decline.