Knight and Day

The Order of the Garter is entirely in the gift of the monarch. There is no Ministerial involvement. The Queen alone has chosen to confer it on Tony Blair. The monarchy keeps sweet a lot of people who need to be kept sweet. But I am entirely at a loss as to why it has that effect on them, and today may have been the day when it ceased to do so.

On balance, I would not abolish the monarchy. A British Presidential Election would be a choice between the next Bullingdon Club member in line and someone who had casually given a trifling £50,000 to the most recently successful candidate for the Leadership of the Labour Party. No one else would even make it onto the ballot paper, and I would not want either of those as my Head of State. Nor would I want to abolish the Royal Prerogative. Rather, I want it to be exercised by a Prime Minister who aspired to strengthen families and communities through economic equality and international peace.

But the monarchy, and with it the exercise of the Royal Prerogative by persons who most certainly did not share those aspirations, does not depend on the support of people like me. It depends on the support of people who, as long as the monarchy and especially the present Queen were simply there, were prepared to overlook the fact that hardly anything that they really wanted ever happened, while all sorts of things that they did not want did happen, no matter who was in government. We may now be living through the end of all of that.