Radical Rightists, Indeed

Was Brian Mulroney a Communist Party member? After all, he was accurately shown on last night's episode of The Queen as lined up against Margaret Thatcher over South Africa, where the monarch had previously been deposed as an act of anti-British revenge, and from which Thatcher had imported coal in order to destroy the jobs of Her Majesty's subjects. No wonder that, as Thatcher herself once described the Queen, she was "the sort of person who voted for the SDP".

And no wonder that the Radical Right that surrounded and adored Thatcher was and is so very anti-Commonwealth and indeed anti-monarchist generally, as the comments on their favourite blogs are increasingly bringing out into the open. The monarchy and everything for which it stands are against everything for which they stand. With the old Communists and Trotskyists who are now their bosom buddies elsewhere, they are by far the greatest threat to it since the seventeenth century.

As any perusal of, for example, the Statement of Principles of the Henry Jackson Society will confirm, they have no doubt as to the main weapon in the armoury. Placing them firmly in the tradition of Thatcher, who heavily restricted access by Commonwealth products and persons while signing the Single European Act, and who did eventually accept some sanctions against South Africa, provided that they were imposed, not by the Commonwealth, but by what was always going to become the EU.