From BrightHouse To White House?

Some people have a monarchist heart but a republican head. I am the opposite. But there is no way of sugarcoating the fact that, while the Sovereign Grant has gone up at more than the rate of inflation throughout the austerity years, the Duchy of Lancaster has been mixed up in tax avoidance, including investment in BrightHouse, with its typical weekly payment option of a fixed 69.9 per cent APR.

And now, the Duchy of Cornwall. To every part of the Welfare State, to every nationalisation, to every retreat from Empire, to every social liberalisation, and to every EU treaty, the people who are kept sweet by the monarchy need to add the next monarch's long and strong support for the most fashionable of policy responses to climate change.

Of course, they themselves also have to explain their never-ending glee at the destruction of the British coal industry, and that by a Prime Minister who believed fanatically in the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions as the solution to anthropogenic global warming. In the same way, the Greens need to be asked the straight Yes-No question, "Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?"

If the Royal Family really does have its fabled instinct for self-preservation, then it will support the transfer of the exercise of the Royal Prerogative, including Royal Assent, to at least seven out of nine Co-Presidents, elected for an eight-year term, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the highest scoring nine elected. In any case, that needs to happen. Those who inexplicably look to the monarchy as their political protector would in fact find that their views were much better represented by this arrangement.

Meanwhile, the investments of the present and future Supreme Governors of the Church of England need to be made subject to the control of the Church of England's Ethical Investment Advisory Group.