THE BRITISH royal family has rejected claims that former Labour prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been snubbed because they have not been invited to Friday’s wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
The two have not been included in the list of 1,900 even though former Conservative prime minister John Major will attend, while his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, was also invited, but will not attend because of ill-health.
Mrs Thatcher and Mr Major were invited, Clarence House said yesterday, because they are Knights of the Garter – the royalty’s highest award for chivalry, though their Labour successors have not yet, at any rate, been so honoured.
Membership of the Order of the Garter by former prime ministers is not usually granted until some years after they have left power: Mrs Thatcher became a Lady Companion of the Garter in 1995, five years after leaving office, while Mr Major received his eight years out of Downing Street.
“There is no protocol reason to invite them, so unless [the couple] wanted to invite former prime ministers for a personal reason, there’s no reason to do so. It is a private wedding and the couple are entitled to invite whoever they want to it,” said a Clarence House spokesman.
Though the royal family firmly denies snubbing Mr Blair and Mr Brown, the invitations revive the often-difficult relations that existed between Buckingham Palace and Mr Blair, though Mr Brown’s relations were better.
In his autobiography, A Journey, Mr Blair chose to reveal some details of his private conversations with Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, which is said to have irked some in the palace.
Though grateful to him for the advice offered following the 1997 death of Princess Diana, sources in the palace briefed journalists in 2002 that Mr Blair had tried to take too prominent a role after the death of the Queen Mother in 2002.
Mr Blair’s wife, Cherie, who refused to curtsey before the royals, unlike Mr Brown’s wife, Sarah, revealed that their last child had been conceived during a visit to Balmoral, when she had left her contraception back in No 10 Downing Street.
So far, neither Mr Blair nor Mr Brown has commented, and they are unlikely to do so.