Critical Tipping Points

Prince William is at least a third generation Green. If that is now out of step with the Tory shires, and local election results would suggest otherwise, then those shires have changed. The Conservatives were the party of Net Zero for 40 years. Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Margaret Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, the year that the Miners’ Strike began. That was not a coincidence.

Thatcher began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, but she was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, 36 years ago today, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Boris Johnson, whose entourage is taking over Reform UK, described Thatcher’s destruction of the coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for many years.

On this, Thatcher was in lockstep both with the then Duke of Edinburgh, an asylum-seeker who had married his cousin, and with the firstborn of that marriage, then then Prince of Wales. Thatcher and the Royal Family had two great joint achievements, the conversion of the entire Political Class to anti-industrial Malthusianism, and the complete transformation of the attitude of the middle and the respectable working classes to divorce, which was regarded with widespread horror until three of the Queen’s four children were divorced and two of them remarried, in one case to the cause of his divorce. It is that cause who has now been crowned Queen. As to the last one, her third child’s surname uniquely has no hyphen as if, like his mother, he were only distantly related to the Mountbattens, and he is a Mister Firstname Surname like the rest of us, rather than the Lord Firstname Surname that would befit a younger son of a Duke. Amid all the talk of how unlike his siblings he was even physically, it is suggested that he “may” be an Esquire, because he “may” be resident in the United Kingdom as a member of one or more foreign Royal Houses.

Having first married in the Catholic Church, the never-widowed Nicolas Sarkozy was onto his third wife when he was the First and Only Honorary Canon of Saint John Lateran, the Dedication of which we shall celebrate tomorrow, so it is not all that incongruous that the King should be the Royal Confrater of Saint Paul Outside the Walls while civilly married to a woman whose first husband was still alive and with whom his affair had resulted in the collapse of both of their first marriages, hers, again, having been celebrated in the Catholic Church. But the Pope’s installation as Papal Confrater of Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor should be an occasion for demonstration by everyone from the Orange Order to the equally Protestant proponents of Marian Co-Redemption, and from the #NotMyKing travelling circus to what must now be recognised as the equally republican Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster. All led by evicted former local resident, Sarah Ferguson.