The official wedding list published last week contained a number of deposed royals, including representatives of the Greek, Yugoslavian, Bulgarian and Romanian royal families, but no one from Iran’s Pahlavi dynasty.
Iran’s senior diplomat in Iran was invited, along with all the other heads of missions of countries with which Britain has diplomatic relations. It isn’t known if he was planning to attend.
The Islamic Republic is planning to make some profit off the wedding, despite its disparaging news coverage of he event. It works like this….
After the wedding, the newlyweds enter an open carriage drawn by horses and are carried back to Buckingham Palace. Views from buildings along the route are the most prestigious place to be if one doesn’t hold one of the 1,900 tickets to get inside Westminster Abbey for the wedding service itself.
And it just so happens that the National Iranian Oil Co. (NIOC) has what is rated the ideal bird’s eye view, equal to the view from the Sanctuary beside the Abbey. According to British news reports, well-wishers are being offered rentals of nine rooms in the Sanctuary and two offices in the NIOC premises. Each is charging the astounding sum of £100,000 ($165,000) per room for the view.
It is not known what non-invitees are willing to fork over that much to the NIOC.
The Tehran media are not ga-ga over the wedding. In fact, they sometimes seem to be competing to see who can come up with the most nasty and disparaging news stories. The most common theme is that the wedding costs a fortune and is bleeding wealth from the British public to benefit a corrupt institution.
State television on Sunday even reported how the English public, “who are badly off because of economic conditions,” rioted last Saturday and burned down a store in Bristol. The report is true, but the protesters were objecting to the opening a new chain store video outlet. The protest had nothing to do with the royal wedding.
State television also said the police were deployed in large numbers “in fear of armed attacks or popular protests.”
One of the royal invitees was the crown prince of Bahrain. There were many snickers in the London press wondering if he would have the nerve to show up in light of the repression in Bahrain. The crown prince announced he would not attend.
However, in keeping with Britain’s shift to a multi-cultural country, this wedding will not only see the attendance of the leadership of the Church of England, but of many other religious leaders including Imam Mohammad Raza, Maulana Syed Raza Shabbarm of the Muham-madi Trust, and Malcolm Deboo, the president of the Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe.