Denmark’s unfolding royal saga fills the gap left by The Crown

Where Britain’s royals can be relied upon to keep up appearances, leave it to the European monarchs to rule with a series of telenovela-style twists. And so Queen Margrethe II, Denmark’s beloved chain-smoking royal premier, rang in 2024 – how else? – with a live abdication announcement; the first in the country for 500 years.

Her stepping down in a fortnight will not mean the end of the family’s reign, however, but simply see her headline-making heir, Crown Prince Frederik, continue what is by now an established tradition. Think The Crown meets Borgen, playing out in real time across the North Sea.

The shock of Margrethe, who is known as Daisy, relinquishing a position royal commentators believed she would “never” abdicate has been compounded by the hole she will leave. Known as the world’s “quirkiest queen”, the 83-year-old has drummed up significant support for the royal family in Denmark, near doubling those in favour within the country to over 80 per cent.

Since her accession 52 years ago, she has become an international icon, too, frequently peering out from yellowing copies of Hello! and OK! magazines stacked in hair salons and GPs’ waiting rooms.

An “eccentric at heart,” according to Vogue, her taste for bold colours (including a striking purple worn during her resignation address) – sometimes displayed in outfits she made herself, or picked up in solo visits to Copenhagen’s boutiques – have long signalled her desire to do anything but blend in. In life as well as her wardrobe, Daisy has eschewed a stiff upper lip for loose ones, unafraid to let her feelings be known in one of the five languages she speaks.

As such, “the people’s monarch” has duly built a global fanbase; the antithesis of the colder, quieter rule favoured here in Britain. Along with hobnobbing with monarchs from around the world, and the likes of Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton, her pursuits have always been shown off full throttle – from her artworks hanging in the country’s galleries to drawings in the Danish edition of Lord of the Rings, costumes she designed for the Royal Ballet and, oh, popping along to a clutch of excavations to satisfy her passion for archaeology. It’s a far cry from the British royals, who typically rely on an interest in horses to constitute a personality.

Not so for Daisy, who has always kept the window on her colourful life open. Last year, she described how a rift between her and her younger son, Joachim, “hurts me. Difficulties and disagreements can arise in any family, including mine. The whole country has witnessed this.”

The question now is whether 55-year-old Frederik, fresh from a recent spin through the tabloids, will lead in the same vein. I, for one, cannot wait to find out.

Daisy’s dashing eldest, a former partyboy who spent periods at Harvard, the UN and the Danish navy (where he was nicknamed “Pingo”, after once waddling around in a water-filled wetsuit during special ops training) was in November pictured with Genoveva Casanova, a Mexican socialite and ex-wife of a Spanish duke. The timing has led to some speculation that the Queen’s shock abdication is less a matter of her desire “to leave the responsibility to the next generation”, and more a bid to keep Frederik’s wife, the highly popular Princess Mary, at the forefront of the Danish monarchy.

Daisy is shrewd to set her succession plan in motion before it is too late; well aware that the fairytale meeting between Frederik and Mary, who was born in Australia to Scottish parents, has helped to further boost the monarchy’s appeal.

Mary was working as an advertising executive when she met the Danish heir in a Sydney pub during the 2000 Olympic Games (and had no idea who he was); four children later, they have become the country’s answer to the Waleses – a commoner and a royal ushering in a vision of the monarchy’s future, while the younger royal sibling is edged from the fold.

In what now seems to hint at pre-abdication planning, Joachim’s four children were stripped of their royal titles, Sussex-style, in 2022, with the Queen telling local media at the time that it was “better” she take an axe to the extended family than Frederik, “because then it’s the old lady that made the decision”.

The world’s only (and perhaps wiliest) queen will be well missed. But surely the royals, themselves the gatekeepers of tradition, will ensure that Denmark’s longest-running soap opera continues.