Not The Sun Prince

On Any Questions, only Kelvin MacKenzie laid into Prince Charles over his intervention to ensure that not everything decreed by the Groucho Club shall come to pass. He decried both monarchy and, at another point, any public role for religion, even favourably (if without citation) quoting Stalin on the latter question.

There is nothing remotely surprising about this. Quite the reverse, in fact. The greatest threat to this country’s Christian, monarchical constitution – indeed, the only such threat has ever existed in any serious way – has come, and still does come, from what could loosely be called Thatcherism, i.e., the entrenchment of 1960s immorality in the form of neoliberal economics.

That threat has intensified, to put it at its very mildest, since assorted old Communists and Trotskyists correctly identified these as the perfect new means to their own entirely unchanged ends. But it was always inherent in Thatcherism anyway.

It is impossible to imagine a less Thatcherite figure than Prince Charles, whose mother the Leaderene herself once called “the sort of person who votes for the SDP”, and whose ongoing reconstitution of a Court Party is the best news in at least half a generation for those of us who would prefer a genuinely pluriform polity. He is not always right. But as hung Parliaments, far more accurately reflecting opinion in the country at large, become more and more common, we could scarcely hope for a better man to assume the functions of the monarch in that event as the coming decades unfold.

I wonder if he fancies helping to fund a purely educational, and therefore legally charitable, body comparable to those other bastions of tax-free political impartiality, Policy Exchange, the Henry Jackson Society, the Social Affairs Unit, and so forth?

That body would study past, present, and potential future remedies against poverty, ignorance, illness, idleness, squalor and armed conflict by means of central and local government action inclusive of concerns variously rural, monarchist, cautious and organic with regard to constitutional change, Eurosceptical, Unionist, pro-Commonwealth, academically selective, economically patriotic, morally and socially conservative, explicitly Christian, conservationist rather than environmentalist, and foreign policy realist.

Certain regular readers will doubtless be having words…