The Royal Family - skip a generation?

‘ ’Bin a lotta talk about..’ was how the Letters from Idi Amin in Private Eye Magazine used to begin and it seems a fitting way to approach the subject of the Royal Family.

An interesting start might be a series of extraordinary articles in a number of papers towards the end of last year to the effect that Prince William was going to become a ‘Shadow King’, taking over lots of duties from his grandmother, HMQ. The elephant in the room was that William has a still extant father, who hasn’t had his turn yet (big ears, ruddy complexion, married en secondes noces to that horsey woman… it seemed we had all forgotten his name).

Then, interestingly (this is interesting, even though sections of the media and the various palaces seem to be trying to feed us opinions) the Shadow King in waiting said he didn’t want the job but wanted to concentrate on his military career (judging by his uniform he seems currently to be in the RAF).

Then came a rather peculiar article in the Daily Telegraph from George Pitcher. It said that St James’ Palace had gone to some efforts to squash the ‘Shadow King’ story because ‘Loyal subjects were hoping it might be true’. And Pitcher goes on to give his view about why that might be the case. ‘..(Prince Charles) has the ill fortune to have been a victim of a changing monarchy in changing times, a challenge that regrettably he has not met well. His demand for old-fashioned deference and his resistance to globalisation and technology make him not just a stranger to the 21st century but ill-equipped for most of what happened in the second half of the 20th.’

Pitcher, astonishingly, goes on to claim it was Charles’ stint in Cambridge in the 1960s with its liberal atmosphere that ruined him. ‘Prince William is unencumbered by any of this post-modern clap-trap.’ So, old fashioned deference and 1960s liberalism, a curious mixture.

What proponents of the idea of skipping a generation (that is what this is all about) seem to omit from their freely given opinions is that if Prince Charles is old fashioned, how much more so must be his mother, who was born in 1926 when George V had ten years yet to reign. HMQ has not spoken out on the issues which annoy George Pitcher about Prince Charles (architecture, globalisation) for the simple reason she isn’t allowed to, and nor will Charles be when he becomes king.

I am a fan of Prince Charles, whilst thinking he is wrong on global warming and globalisation, and I am not a fan of the present queen, who is not and never could be in tune with the zeitgeist and should have abdicated in 1993. Others may differ, but we have had some good monarchs and some bad over the years and Charles may prove to be one or the other. What we cannot do is allow public opinion (that is to say the press and the insider rumour mongers) to decide who the Head of State should be. If we go down that road it should be by election, and don’t forget that republics have good presidents and bad ones, just the same. And they cost just as much, or more.

Either we have the monarchy, with its sometimes strange looking people and its rigid system of successor selection, or we don’t.