Sharp Practice

It is wrong to bribe the Prime Minister to appoint you as Chairman of the BBC, but it is not wrong that the Prime Minister should make that appointment. We do not have too many political appointments in this country. We have too few. Or rather, we allow the most violently extreme faction of our polity to present itself as politically neutral in order to confer all manner of public positions on its members, a very tightly knit body that it is almost impossible to join.

In the cause of economic equality and international peace, which is the only way of defending family and community life from the “woke capitalism” that is the only kind of either, we ought not to be seeking to abolish the Royal Prerogative, but to exercise it. The whole of it, no matter to which committee or self-perpetuating oligarchy any part of it might have been surrendered. All of it must be taken back, and in most cases that would be perfectly simple to do.

Previous Governments have handed over jaw-dropping amounts of power to the Deep State, having of course been installed for the purpose. These people clearly never wanted to run the country. Again, that was why they were put in by the people who did. For example, while each generation presumably produces an obvious Astronomer Royal, why hand over the power to appoint Regius Professors, or certain Oxbridge Heads of House, or the Poet Laureate? Never mind the judiciary? Or 26 members of Parliament? And how entitled is the Liberal Establishment in the Church of England, to assume the right to appoint those 26 legislators over the rest of us?

But those powers have never been legislated away. Almost nothing in Britain ever is quite abolished or repealed. It falls into prolonged desuetude, but it is still there. Jeremy Corbyn would have made full use of the Royal Prerogative; there are no republicans in possession of the powers of a Medieval monarch. Disgracing Eton and Oxford, Boris Johnson also showed tendencies in that direction. So the Deep State had to get rid of the pair of them. It has done so, even before either of them could turn his attention to reversing the statutory surrender of control over monetary policy. Lest Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt show any tendencies in that direction, then the Deep State has ensured that it has the shallow Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves to fall back on.

Thankfully, the opinion polls bear no resemblance to real votes cast. We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.