Ross MacManus<\/a>] used to play the staff ball at Buckingham Palace when I was a kid, and we had to go in the back door with the help. So I thought, this time I\u2019m going in the front door. I went out of curiosity, sceptical and cynical.\u201d<\/p>\nHis father was a talented musician who played with Joe Loss and his orchestra in the 1950s and found TV fame singing Secret Lemonade Drinker in the R. White\u2019s Lemonade adverts in the 1970s.<\/p>\n
Costello went on: \u201cThe Palace itself is tatty \u2013 I didn\u2019t lean on any pillars because I thought they may be papier m\u00e2ch\u00e9. But when I saw how much it meant to people in education, charity, medicine, I thought I could do with being less cynical. A marine behind me fainted from emotion.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cAfterwards, I sat with the Irish press, so I was in the Palace discussing Sinn Fein. Dad would have loved that. He was a lifelong republican and would have told me to go, like my mother did \u2013 just so I could look them in the eye.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the big mistake they\u2019ve made\u2026 is that what they represent with \u2018empire\u2019 is unforgivable. Why don\u2019t they just change the name in OBE to \u2018excellence\u2019? Then everybody could be happy.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2019, Costello said he was \u201ctickled\u201d to be nominated for the honour by Theresa May, the then prime minister, saying it \u201cconfirms my long held suspicion nobody really listens to the words in songs\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.telegraph.co.uk \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The singer told the newspaper: \u201cMy dad [Ross MacManus] used to play the staff ball at Buckingham Palace when I was a kid, and we had to go in the back door with the help. So I thought, this time I\u2019m going in the front door. I went out of curiosity, sceptical and cynical.\u201d His […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2448760,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[480905,26597,24003,348521,21738,22769,344742,24515,382398],"class_list":["post-2448759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-british-empire","tag-buckingham-palace","tag-celebrity-news","tag-elvis-costello","tag-news","tag-royal-family","tag-standard","tag-the-royal-family","tag-us-content"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Elvis-Costello-Royal-family-should-ditch-\u2018empire-from-OBEs.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2448759"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2448761,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448759\/revisions\/2448761"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2448760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2448759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2448759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2448759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}