A Prince Among Men

No, Lord Taverne. You may or may not be right about the science. But you are wrong on the constitutional principle.

Prince Charles, like his father, might not be as pretty and telegenic, or as adept at pretending to be middle-class when not, as his late first wife was. But each of them has, in any of many long years, done a lot more charity work than she ever did in her entire life. And they have done it tastefully without the sort of publicity that she went in for as if she really had been one of the nouveaux riches that she affected to be. (In fact, like all the great noble houses of England and Scotland, she despised the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas for being precisely that.)

And Prince Charles represents constitutionality, continuity, Christianity and the Commonwealth, including the constitutional, continuous and Christian Common Law. He represents the countryside, the old upper class, and (at least potentially) the working class. He represents (again, at least potentially) the trade union leaders and such like whom monarchs are happy to knight or ennoble, and who are happy to be knighted or ennobled by them. And he represents the idea of sheer providence, conferring responsibilities on the more fortunate towards the less fortunate.

His increasingly strident critics hate all these things. Instead, they want to send off toffish officers and chavish other ranks to be harvested in endless, pointless, unwinnable wars.

There are many good reasons to demand and to welcome the return of the historically normal and normative activist monarchy promised, and increasingly delivered, by Prince Charles. One of the very best is as a focus of opposition to those present and future wars.

God Bless The Prince Of Wales.