Tales of the unelected

Today, Prince Charles, heir to the throne, is going to address a committee of the European Parliament, about the usual green stuff.

Any new insights he might have will not have been offered to the British Parliament or any of its committees nor to any other UK organisation. He is going to Europe.

Here’s what he said the last time he went brown-nosing the Eurocrats: ‘Determination and principled leadership has never been more needed. Surely this is just the moment in history for which the European Union was created?‘

Someone needs to drill into Charles’ head

1 The European Union was not created to give determined, principled leadership. It was created to enforce the hegemony of a new political class, above election or electoral scrutiny.

2 In his own country (remember us, your Royal Highness?) the European Union is a contentious issue. By cosying up to them Charles is making a political point, and he is not supposed to be doing that

3 Our relationship with Europe is a constitutional matter, as is his own position, and I can assure HRH that if and when they finally seal the deal and absorb us into a united Europe, they won’t be wanting him. It is not only the British people who can turn Britain into a republic.

The hands of the Monarchy clock have clicked on to 6pm.

Sunday Thinkpiece: Prince Charles

It used to be that the only time you heard the words ‘British Constitution’ was when someone wanted to test if you were drunk. Also ‘She stood outside Wilkinson’s Fish Sauce Shop welcoming him in’. Happy days.

Now, unfortunately, you hear it quite a lot.

Two of the reasons for this are the way Europe seems to be running our lives and the Coalition Government. Both have been discussed in these pages before and will be again. The third is The Prince of Wales.

I don’t know what it is about the title, but of the last five, four have caused no end of trouble. George, who became George IV, known as Prinny, was surrounded by sexual and financial scandal, as was Queen Victoria’s son Albert, who became Edward VII. Whilst George (later George V) seemed to have lived a sober and constitutional life, his only problem being that he was a crashing bore, his son, later Edward VIII caused all that trouble with the abdication. He also wanted to influence social policy, having been on several visits to the poor and saying ‘something must be done’.

Now we have Prince Charles.

It seems that 50% of the population want him to give up the monarchy in favour of William. It should be noticed, however, that this is because they think he is barking mad. It started out with him admitting that he talked to his plants, which of course many gardeners do, and since then almost his every utterance (and to be fair, there have been many) has been portrayed as if he were a couple of scones short of a cream tea. He speaks regularly on the environment, conservation, genetically modified foods, alternative medicine and architecture, none of which really interest the average chap. The public, of course, liked his first wife and feels his second either doesn’t have her winning ways or is somehow responsible for her death.

But that is not how the establishment are thinking. They have another beef. Here is Sir Max Hastings in the Daily Mail last Saturday with an article entitled ‘Why Prince Charles is too dangerous to be king’. Hastings, I should mention, is a fully paid up member of the establishment and former editor of the conservative Daily Telegraph.

Hastings contrasts the reigning Queen ‘At the heart of the Queen’s brilliant success for almost 60 years is that we have been denied the slightest clue as to what she thinks about anything but dogs and horses’ with Prince Charles in a quote from Jeremy Paxman : ‘The Prince had ¬consistently misunderstood or ignored a basic truth at the heart of the relationship between ¬royalty and the people.

‘He seemed to believe his significance lay in what he believed and did. The truth was simply that his significance lay in who he was.’

Hastings continues. ‘A courtier (Max moves in the right circles, you see) recently said to me: ‘You shouldn’t worry about this. Charles knows that from the day he becomes King, he must keep his mouth shut.’ But in the same week, one of the Prince’s intimate circle privately said: ‘The nation is ready for a visionary monarchy.’

I do not believe (writes Maxy) that if the Prince and those around him think any such thing, Charles would hit trouble as fast and hard as a truck crashing into a wall when he’s the occupant of the throne. ‘

I quote Hastings because his article is recent. Plenty of establishment types are thinking and saying the same.

For myself I don’t really agree. I don’t agree that the Queen has not given ‘the slightest clue as to what she thinks about anything but dogs and horses’ – look at her support for the coalition – nor that it would necessarily be a good thing if that were the case. And I do believe that the Prince’s utterances will in large part cease when he becomes king. There seems to be an uninformed dichotomy between saying he is an idiot and that he is so intelligent he is dangerous.

What I and I rather fancy a lot of people think is that when the Prince says something I disagree with I find him an irritating unconstitutional nuisance, and when he says something I agree with I thank God we have someone who is prepared to say such things.

Perhaps one of the problems lies with primogeniture itself. People live a lot longer and far from having the problem of someone becoming King at 5 years old like Louis XIV and having to lead the army, we have the problem of what to do with them as they wait patiently to step up to the top job. George IV became king at 57, Edward VII at 59 and Charles is already 62.

What think should have happened is that the Queen should have abdicated in 1982 after the Falklands War, or at the latest 1987 after being on the throne 35 years. Charles would have been in the job and largely quiet for twenty odd years, and now getting ready to hand over to his son William.

One of the problems is that we don’t have a constitutional definition of what either the Prince or the monarch should be doing. I see them as guardians of the constitution and it has to be said that in that job the Queen has failed: giving away power to the Prime Minister rather than parliament, clinging to the Commonwealth even when it was just a lobby group of unpleasant dictators who wanted to show South Africa as worse than them, and failing the nation over the coalition.

We cannot have the primogeniture system perverted to bypass the intelligent in favour of a younger, prettier model. I cannot imagine Prince Charles will make a worse fist of this than his mother and believe he should be given the chance. If for whatever reason he doesn’t take the job we should have a Republic, with a President (Perhaps Charles himself as the first one) attuned to his role as keeper of the constitution.

Fresh Prince

The Prince of Wales has made a list of twenty lifestyle changes for the average family in the blurb to his new environmental movement Start. They include taking fewer baths and recycling used paint tins.

I am not saying this is wrong: if you believe that unrecycled paint tins caused the flooding in Pakistan it is your duty to do something about it and the heir to the throne is helping you.

It’s just that...immediately this stuff was issued, reporters wanted to know whether the Prince never took baths, and of course his staff didn’t feel able to discuss his toilet with the riff raff on the streets (or the ‘great unwashed’ as they used to be called).

Queen Elizabeth I, in a 16th century PR démarche, announced that she took a bath once a month whether she needed it or not. But we live in more genteel times now.

What I am against is that this is all going to bring the PoW under scrutiny and make him look a twit, which is something he really doesn’t need right now.

For me, there is a strong similarity between the Prince of Wales and the State of Israel: instinctively I want to support them both, but each seems intent on making it as difficult as possible for me to do so.

Prince Charles

Today is the 60th birthday of HRH The Prince of Wales.

The older I get the more I find myself hoping for a new constitutional settlement. Other than sorting out the Union, the over-inflated powers of the executive and the problem of Europe, I think one of the most urgent things to do is find a role for this intelligent, energetic man. It is a tragedy that the monarchy and successive governments have been unable or unwilling to do so.

It would be the best thing for us, and the best birthday present we could give him.

Price Charles and Global Warming

I am a big fan of Prince Charles. He has spoken such a lot of sense over the years that I can allow him a piece of ill-advised nonsense occasionally, and such is, it would appear, his latest speech to the European Parliament on climate change.

Cranmer berates him (and HRH such a supporter of the prayer book!) for his statement ‘Surely this is just the moment in history for which the European Union was created?’ saying ‘When a rump Parliament, corrupt Church and a compromised Crown are all united in favour of ‘ever closer union’, only divine intervention, revolution, or a latter-day Cromwell can save the British people from the 'unavoidable' tyranny’

Well, well. No one is more eurosceptical than me, and I do think the Prince was ‘ill-advised’ to make such a political statement (I can only assume the PM’s office read his speech in advance and concluded it would take some of the pressure off them – which is one reason why it was ill advised).

But actually I don’t mind environmental issues being sorted at EU level – it is a cross border thing. It’s all the other interference into our lives I can’t stand. It’s easy enough: discuss, make a proposal, then publish the names of those countries that disagreed (no vetoes, thanks).

There’s a couple of things I can’t grasp, however. Firstly I keep reading that there is in fact no global warming at the moment. That statistically (whatever that means) global temperatures have been stable for 10 years. Do the environmentalists accept this? In what way is it wrong?

Secondly, HRH talks about warming of 1.5 degrees but the Kyoto protocol would (if it had worked, and it didn’t) have reduced temperatures by only 0.5deg. Doesn’t this mean we are wasting our time trying to cut carbon emissions to reduce temperatures and would spend the money better looking after the people who will be affected?

Perhaps one of my readers knows the answer to all this. I don’t.