Prince Charles – Blood and Porridge

September 11, 2022September 12, 2022

London Bridge is down

From wikipedia.org / © Joel Rouse / Ministry of Defence

London Bridge is down. No, I’m not referring to a movie that stars Gerald Butler. I’m talking about the code-phrase used to communicate the news of the monarch’s death to the British government, police, armed forces and broadcasters, triggering the start of an elaborate and much-prepared plan that oversees the monarch’s funeral, the period of national mourning and the coronation of a successor. Those words were sent to the British establishment earlier this week, for September 8^th saw the passing of Queen Elizabeth II at the age of 96.

Not long ago, at the time of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, I expressed my thoughts about the British monarchy on this blog. Namely that, while monarchies might work for other European countries, slimmed-down monarchies in countries with fewer historical neuroses and fewer modern delusions than Britain, the British monarchy just seemed to epitomise and encourage so much stupidity, unfairness and obsequiousness that it wasn’t worth conserving.

That’s been my view for most of my life. Admittedly, for a few years around the 2012 London Olympics I took a slightly more benevolent view of the institution: “…my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth. It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect.” This was “partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town. This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run….”

Furthermore, Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics had temporarily fooled me into believing “that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country. Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.”

By the time of her Platinum Jubilee earlier this year, however, and with the country infected by the jingoistic and backward-looking craziness of Brexit, which called to mind not Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony but Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zombie movie 28 Days Later (2002), my tune had changed. Britain had become such a basket-case that if it was to survive in any sane form, it needed drastic surgery carried out on its many, ridiculously-archaic institutions. This included the abolition of its monarchy.

And I’m afraid the Platinum Jubilee’s sequel to the Queen’s hook-up with James Bond at the 2012 Olympics, which featured her having tea and marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear, didn’t work for me. Paddington, after all, was an immigrant who’d arrived undocumented from Peru and, in the rabid atmosphere of 2022 Britain, Priti Patel would probably have stuck him on a plane and flown him off to Rwanda for ‘processing’. Also, I thought it must have been terrifying for poor Paddington to find himself in a palace guarded by men wearing the skins of his relatives on top of their heads.

From unsplash.com / © Anika Mikkelson

The next days – weeks, months – will showcase all the idiocies that afflict modern-but-monarchist Britain. The Queen’s funeral and the coronation of son Charles will be a never-ending ordeal of Ruritanian faff and ritualistic flummery. Many Britons, of course, approve of this and believe it represents threads of tradition that run back to the country’s distant past. Actually, much of this arcane pomp was devised by that randy old goat Edward VII at the start of the last century. I find it fascinating, incidentally, that one of Edward VII’s many mistresses was Alice Keppel, great-grandmother of a certain Camilla Parker-Bowles.

From wikipedia.org / © Udo Keppler 1901

There will also be tsunamis of sanctimonious and sycophantic drivel written and broadcast about the Queen by the toadies, grovellers, cap-doffers, forelock-tuggers and brown-nosers that infest Britain’s mainstream media. One of life’s great ironies is that the media currently churning out drooling eulogies about the wonderfulness of the departed monarch was the same media that made life hell for many of her family’s members. Her ex-daughter-in-law wouldn’t have died in a car-crash in 1997 if there hadn’t been a fleet of paparazzi pursuing her, desperate for photos to sell to the tabloids. Incessant media hounding and tittle-tattle was a major reason why Prince Harry chose to bail out of the royal circus. And who can blame him? If British journalistic hacks thought they could accuse his wife Meghan Markle of murdering the Queen and get away with it, they would.

And inevitably, the Queen’s passing will add a tankerload of fuel to the culture-war fires that have burned across Britain since 2016 and Brexit. Already, social media has been overrun by people, swivel of eye and gammon-pink of complexion, desperate to weaponise her death against the woke, lefty snowflakes they hate so much. Spencer Morgan, son of the dreaded Piers Morgan and a supposed champion of free speech, opined the other day: “Sad thing is there will be people in this country celebrating this. They’re the ones we need to focus on deporting.” Correction: a champion only of free speech he agrees with. In his case, obviously, the blighted apple hasn’t fallen far from the twisted old tree.

Meanwhile, Henry Bolton, embarrassingly short-lived leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (he lasted less than five months), expressed his disgust that “most British schools no longer teach their pupils the National Anthem, or fly the Union flag” and called on Liz Truss to “issue an instruction to all schools to rectify this omission, and do so prior to Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.” Funnily enough, I went to school in the 1970s and 1980s and I don’t remember being taught the National Anthem or seeing the Union Jack flying back then. And a couple of my schools were attended by Northern Irish Protestants, generally the most Queen-adoring, flag-respecting folk in the UK.

Meanwhile, at this moment, I’m sure social media accounts are being scoured the length and breadth of the country. This is as right-wing journalists, politicians and rabble-rousers search for any off-message disloyalty towards Her Majesty expressed by supporters of political parties they disapprove of (Labour, the Scottish National Party, the Greens), members of news outlets they disapprove of (Novara Media), fans of football clubs they disapprove of (Liverpool, Celtic), comedians they disapprove of (Joe Lycett), etc., intent on starting a holy war if they find something. Already on twitter, I’ve seen one right-wing gobshite fulminate at Jeremy Corbyn for, in a tweeted tribute to the Queen, reminiscing that he “enjoyed discussing our families, gardens and jam-making with her.” Clearly, it was okay for Paddington Bear to discuss marmalade with the recently deceased Her Majesty, but not okay for Jeremy Corbyn to discuss jam with her.

From twitter.com/jeremycorbyn

Thanks to all the patriotic breast-beating and blabber, this is a golden opportunity too for newly-anointed Prime Minister Liz Truss and her government, a government in which talent is not so much lacking as non-existent, to sweep under the carpet the multiple crises facing the country. Mind you, as those crises include skyrocketing energy bills and inflation, Brexit’s crippling of the economy, the war in Ukraine, the potential arrival of new, deadlier Covid variants and the climate-change emergency, the bulge created under the carpet will be pretty huge. The right-wing mainstream media will aid and abet this. Already, we’ve had the BBC’s Clive Myrie dismiss the energy-bill calamity as ‘insignificant’ compared to the royal news.

Personally, I won’t be grieving over the Queen’s departure, though I feel slightly sad to see her go. That’s mainly because I liked the fact that she’d been a living link with so much history. She was the last surviving world leader to have served (admittedly tenuously) during World War II – she’d been a member of the women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). She’d met 13 out of the 14 past US presidents, kicking off with Harry Truman, missing out on Lyndon B. Johnson for some reason, and surviving her encounter with the hideous, ignorant, orange-skinned one. She came face to face with Marilyn Monroe when, coincidentally, both of them were 30.

She also had to deal with 15 UK prime ministers, firstly Winston Churchill and finally Liz Truss, which doesn’t suggest there’s been any progress in intellect and ability in British politics during the last 70 years. Quite the reverse. By the way, I’m glad she managed to outlast Boris Johnson’s premiership by a couple of days. Perhaps it was her wish not to have that bloviating narcissist hogging the limelight as PM during her mourning and funeral that kept her going until September 8^th.

I should add that I feel that same sense of historical loss whenever someone very old passes away. When I was a kid in Northern Ireland, I knew an elderly lady who could recall the days when Victoria had been on the throne, and being around her when she reminisced was like being in the presence of a human time machine. (Despite being a Northern Irish Protestant, she’d hated ‘the Widow at Windsor‘.)

I saw Queen Elizabeth II in the flesh once, back in 1999, when she attended the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. I was among the crowds along the sides of the Royal Mile when she and Prince Philip scooted past in an open carriage with horsemen riding behind and in front of them. The crowd went, “Hurrah!” Then one of the horses discharged several big dollops of dung onto the street’s surface. While the royal cortege receded, two workers from the city council, a man and woman who looked near retirement-age, hurried onto the street and used brushes and shovels to scoop up the dung and put it in a binbag. The crowd promptly saluted the council workers by shouting “Hurrah!” again. Delighted, the workers accepted this with a gracious wave of their shovels.

Looking between those two humble council workers and the procession making its way up the Royal Mile, I knew where my sympathies lay.

From twitter.com/dalrymplewill

June 12, 2022June 13, 2022

Grovel, Britannia

From wikipedia.org / © Joel Rouse / Ministry of Defence

A week has now passed since the Platinum Jubilee festivities – and the accompanying tsunami of media hype – that celebrated Queen Elizabeth II reaching the 70^th year of her reign on the British throne. I’ve now emerged from my bunker and feel ready to articulate my thoughts about the British Royal Family. It’s fair to say my tolerance of the institution has waxed and waned over the years.

In my youth, during the 1980s and 1990s, I detested them. They seemed a bloody awful lot and it sickened me how much the media kept ramming them down everyone’s throats, though of course, a lot of the public seemed happy to have them rammed down their throats: the aloof Queen and her grumpy husband; the weird and socially awkward Prince Charles and his vacuous-seeming wife Princess Diana who, as it turned out, was sharper than she looked; the porcine Prince Andrew who, as it turned out, was viler than he looked; and the insipid would-be thespian Prince Edward. Princess Anne, however, I didn’t think was that bad, though that was probably only because she supported the national Scottish rugby team.

I knew ordinary people who were every bit as mediocre or dysfunctional as the royals, of course, but I didn’t have to hear about them every time I switched on the television or read about them every time I opened a newspaper. It also galled me that not liking them or even not wanting to know about them was considered unpatriotic in 1980s and 1990s Britain.

Fast forward to 2012, the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth. It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect for the old biddy. This was partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town. This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run. And the Queen had won a modicum of respect from me simply by doing her job for so long. She grew older, greyer, smaller, but still she did her walkabouts, made her public appearances, indulged in boring chit-chat with members of women’s institutes, rotary clubs and Boy Scout troops who’d turned out to see her, and had disreputable politicians come through the doors of Buckingham Palace – Bush, Berlusconi, Sarkozy – whom she put on a smile for.

If someone had forced an 86-year-old relative of mine onto the street every morning and made her tramp around the neighbourhood all day long, saying hello to people, and then when she finally returned to her house, foisted a shower of crooks and chancers upon her for company, I’d have reported them to the police. The Queen might have been one of the richest women on the planet, but what was the point of having shed-loads of money if you were subjected to torture like that every day of your life?

So back in 2012, I thought I could tolerate the idea of a British monarchy. That toleration, though, came with the proviso that the thing needed to be massively scaled down. The inhabitants of the Low Countries and Scandinavia had modestly-sized royal institutions and seemed no less respectful of their monarchs like Albert, Beatrix, Margrethe, Harald and Carl XVI Gustav, so why couldn’t that be the case in Britain? Why did the British Royal Family have to be such a massive and costly operation, featuring as many cast-members as an opulent and labyrinthine American soap opera like Dallas or Dynasty?

That was then, however. Maybe at the time I’d been infected by Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics and believed that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country. Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.

Now I just want the whole thing gone. Abolishing the monarchy the moment the Queen dies would be fine by me. My reversion to republicanism isn’t so much to do with the Queen herself, though she certainly hasn’t done herself any favours in recent years with the revelations about how much of her money is invested in dodgy, tax-avoiding offshore accounts or her eagerness to fund her second son’s 12-million-pound settlement with Virginia Giuffre, who claimed Andrew had sexually assaulted her while she was being trafficked as a minor by Jeffrey Epstein. (Andrew was unable to make an appearance at last week’s Platinum Jubilee festivities because he was stricken, supposedly, with Covid-19. Aye, right.) It’s more to do with the state of Britain. The place is now such a basket-case that it needs to have its Royal Family surgically removed – one of many drastic treatments required if it’s to make any sort of recovery.

For one thing, the Royal Family is the ultimate symbol of Britain’s neurotic obsession with the past. Remove that symbol and you might go some way to breaking the obsession, which hobbles the country left, right and centre.

There’s the dire state of its governing institutions, where more attention is paid to witless Ruritanian flummery like the State Opening of Parliament (the crown getting transported to the Houses of Parliament in a carriage of its own, the ridiculously ruffed Black Rod getting Parliament’s door slammed in his or her face) than to the constitution, which is unwritten and open to abuse by unscrupulous politicians, like the shower we have in office at the moment. The argument is that Britain’s constitution is protected by some absurd, Boy’s Own Paper-style, ‘good chaps’ theory of government. I’d struggle to describe the grinning war criminal Tony Blair, or the squish-faced posho David Cameron, or the Mother of Tears herself Margaret Thatcher as ‘good chaps’; but surely not even the most naïve person in the universe would bestow that term on the current incumbent of No 10 Downing Street.

There’s also the embarrassing preoccupation many Britons have with the Second World War and everything that goes with it (Churchill, the Blitz, Spitfires, Dame Vera Lynn), although to have even childhood memories about the conflict now you’d need to be in your 80s. In 2016, that finest-hour, standing-alone, ourselves-against-the-world narrative was exploited by self-serving ratbags like Nigel Farage, who managed to conflate the European Union with the Third Reich in some people’s minds and got them to vote for the economic and political disaster of Brexit.

Predictably, Britain’s obsession with the past is focused on the nice bits of history – pomp, pageantry, Ladybird Adventure from History books, stiff-upper-lipped World War II movies. There’s not much focus on the misery, poverty and injustices that the British Empire inflicted on millions of its ‘subjects’. Meanwhile, with this mentality, Britain is never to going to have a scaled-down monarchy like the Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, etc., have. It’s always going to be the full-on, super-expensive deal with parades, carriages, horses, bands, guardsmen and so on. It’s like some balding, beer-gutted, 50-something football hooligan covering himself in bling and believing he still looks ‘hard’.

I’d do away with the monarchy too because of the depressing sycophancy it engenders in British society. Everyone who comes into contact with the royals, and with the Establishment generally, seems to immediately de-evolve into a mollusc, apparently on the assumption that the more obsequious you are, the better your chances are of securing a CBE, OBE, knighthood or whatever. This is never more obvious than in the country’s press. British journalists do so much brown-nosing – presumably hoping that one day Her Majesty will reward them with an honour for services to toadying – that their pages, or webpages, seem to turn the colour of shite while you read them.

Inevitably, this brown-nosing was at its brownest during last week’s Platinum Jubilee. And it wasn’t done just by right-wing journalists and politicians wanting to use the Queen as a Culture War ruse to distract attention from the fact that under the current Conservative government there’s a lying sleazeball as Prime Minister, the country’s economic growth is on track to be second-worst in the G20 (after Putin’s pariah-status Russia), and nearly 180,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the last two years.

Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party and someone whom you’d expect to be at least a teensy-weensy bit socialist, wrote in the swivel-eyed, reactionary Daily Telegraph that it was our ‘patriotic duty’ to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee. There it is again – you’re not patriotic if you don’t like the Queen. Meanwhile, former Liberal Democratic leader Tim Farron tweeted: “You don’t need to think that everything about Britain is wonderful, just that being British is wonderful and that the Queen’s reign has been remarkable.” No, Tim, the Queen doesn’t know who you are. She isn’t going to give you a knighthood.

So yes, I just want the monarchy gone. Goodbye Queen, goodbye Prince Charles, goodbye William, Kate and the kids, goodbye all of them. But obviously, that isn’t going to happen. The British Royal Family will endure, undeservedly. And as for the country they’re supposed to represent… Well, I now think it’s beyond all hope.