The Princess' Diary

[Saint Mildrith]

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About

Settled by Scottish and Irish immigrants during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, St Mildrith is a Western European microstate, consisting of a small archipelago in the North Atlantic. It lies three hundred kilometres north of Scotland, and has a population of just over half a million over an area of sixty thousand square kilometres. A protectorate of the United Kingdom since 1707, St Mildrith gained its independence following the signing of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. Oil reserves were discovered in 1925 in the Northern Region. Over the next half century, one-third of St Mildrith’s population enjoyed the country’s strong economic growth on the back of oil exports and tourism, but de-democratisation and economic inequality posed huge challenges for the increasingly authoritarian principality.

Princess Elisabeth inherited the throne after her father Andrew died of old age in April 2020. By 20 May, over ten thousand cases of COVID-19 had been confirmed in neighbouring Scotland to the south—the new monarch used the ongoing global pandemic to pass new emergency decrees and legislation, expanding the reach of her government over the already weak legislature. On 1 August, with the support of two-thirds of the country’s parliamentarians, Elisabeth’s government passed the Law for National Stability. The new law merged the office of the head of state with those of Prime Minister and Speaker of the National Assembly, and gave the young monarch unprecedented absolute authority over the appointment and dismissal of ministers and elected members, making St Mildrith an absolute monarchy in all but name.



Contents

• Prologue [Draft]

Copyright: © St Mildrith Parliamentary Library, 2022. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You are free to copy, distribute and adapt the work, as long as you attribute the work to claudiaintern@libraryofparliament.govt.sm and abide by the other licence terms.

1 • The Princess’ Diary

[Saint Mildrith]

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I

The day the storm began was also the first day of her absolute reign.

The old Prime Minister, standing next to her before a cheering crowd, had spent the entire day looking up at her, nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Together they made their way down the steps and through the parted crowd to the covered balcony, where the ceremony would start.

She knew he was a relic of the past. His obtuseness was the only thing standing on her way. He would always try to halt her reforms and quote her late father’s words unfairly, saying that she was too young for this moment. From the corner of her eye, she saw the old man’s frowning face. He would probably mumble something incomprehensible yet again—that bad people were using her, as if she was just some dumb girl. What an obnoxious old man. She was happy to be rid of him soon.

As she walked she thought about the future of her country. She would start by imagining a better education system for the next generation. But it was not so easy: she would need to hire more teachers and build more schools. Then she imagined for a moment, just as the cheering became louder, about the money she would need to afford it all. Then she would think of the biggest untapped resource in her small country.

When she was fifteen, she met a handsome young man, Jerome, who went on to become her first private secretary. Back then—ten years ago, how the years had passed so quickly—he had said he knew the answer to unlocking her dreams. Dreams were not free, and her country was rich in gold—he said, black gold.

The oil in the Northern Region.

When the North Oil Field was put into production it would be the fifth biggest offshore platform in Europe. All the barrels of black gold to be produced every day would give her all the money in the world to fund her ambitious programmes, for education, with high salaries for the best teachers in Europe perhaps, and probably other good things like grants and help for business owners and working parents. These were her dreams. She knew a few important people in government had opposed the development of the field for almost ten years now, but that was exactly why the Law for National Stability had to go ahead in the first place. In the latter part of Father’s reign, just before he passed away, she’d watched the many hopeless deadlocks happening in the National Assembly. Politicians bickered and shouted loudly and talked endlessly about unimportant things—they were too preoccupied with keeping their seats and riding the gravy train.

The old man was now saying something to her, but all she heard was the rain outside, pouring down so hard that she had to wonder: why are so many people still out there?

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2 • The Princess' Diary