Royal Flush?

Any politician who wants an elected Head of State, wants to be the elected Head of State. Only George Galloway says it out loud, but they all think it. I know for a fact that republicanism is held at every level of all political parties. And I have known far too many politicians to want one as Head of State. I have liked a lot of them. I have respected a lot of them. I have liked and respected quite a few of them. But even so.

The republican and the monarchist cases are both rubbish. We know who wins elections in this country, and who does not. Abolishing the monarchy would not make Britain less class-bound or less corrupt, unless we were to aspire to the classless cleanliness of Ireland, France, Germany, Italy or the United States. The obscene political power that the Royal Family enjoys because of its extreme wealth is the obscene political power of extreme wealth. Other people also have it, and the problem is hardly confined to Britain or to monarchies.

Nor does the monarchy guarantee stability or liberty in a country that had three General Elections in the four years from 2015, that had three Prime Ministers last year alone, and that is blessed with the Public Order Act, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, the Nationality and Borders Act, the Elections Act, the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, the National Security Act, and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, with the Online Safety Bill in the pipeline.

Whatever else may be said of the recent events around Michael Fawcett, while Presidents' entourages also routinely behave in a similar fashion, there is an unduly cosy relationship between the Royal Family and the Police. When Prince Harry was so out of it that he thought that he was having conversations with a pedal bin, then he was surrounded by some of the most carefully vetted Police Officers in the world. Peerages, baronetcies and knighthoods were invented to be sold. It is, however, an altogether graver matter to sell British citizenship. Norman Baker is a serious politician who has been treated as a crank because he has dared to point out that the authorised version of the death of Dr David Kelly was physically impossible. Here we are again.

But the monarchy is what we have. Merely keeping it would not involve spending legislative time on something that would not make matters any better. Monarchists claim that the monarchy embodies things that they spend the rest of their time complaining are not there, backed up by fanciful suggestions about tourism and about soft power. Republicans claim that a republic would be a step towards the classless incorruption that characterised no existing republic in the world, backed up by a fatuous remark about hereditary surgeons, as if there would be elected surgeons. The case for the status quo is weak, but the case for change has not been made.

The last person to win a General Election was Boris Johnson, so republicans must want him as Head of State. There would have to be a nomination process. Candidates would certainly require nomination by one tenth of the House of Commons, 65 MPs, and very probably by one fifth of that House, 130 MPs. Even in the first instance, in the wildly unlikely event of more than two candidates, then the House would whittle them down to the two who would then be presented to the electorate. Almost certainly, only two parties are ever going to have 65 MPs. Certainly, only two are ever going to have 130. In practice, they would probably arrange to alternate the Presidency between them.

In any case, the moment has gone. It was always supposed to have been "when the Queen died", but that made no sense either in principle, since the monarchy is either right or it is wrong, or in practice, since succession is instantaneous, as we saw last year. As for the Royal Prerogative, we should be seeking, not to abolish it, but to exercise it in the cause of economic equality and of international peace. The whole of the Royal Prerogative, that is. The Deep State would fight us to the death. That death must be its own.

Like the Police, or the education system, or the BBC, or anything else that is alleged to have become "politicised", the monarchy has always been political, since, like each of those, the very concept of it is profoundly so. The question is whose politics. Again I say that 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 presume 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. 

The Deep State encouraged violence against Nigel Farage. It has debanked not only him, but also Gina Miller, since it insists on its right to license centrism as much as anything else. It incited the attempted murder of Galloway. It tried to imprison Alex Salmond for the rest of his life. It persecutes the world-historical figure of Julian Assange. And it is in the process of installing as Prime Minister the man who wielded its knife against Corbyn, one of Assange's principal assailants, one of the Deep State's most dedicated living servants, and if not himself a sweaty nonce, then an active sympathiser with such.

It is increasingly obvious that I have been right all along about Prince Andrew, in whose defence I have been uniquely consistent. In any case, he has never run so much as his own bath. It was Peter Mandelson who stayed at Jeffrey Epstein's apartment while Epstein was an incarcerated sex offender and Mandelson was a Cabinet Minister. First Secretary of State, in fact. Deputy Prime Minister in all but name.

This post is this site's thirty-third mention of the connection between Mandelson and Epstein, with the first having been as long ago as 16th August 2019, and with most of these posts having been substantially the same as comments on Guido Fawkes. Yet no one seems to think that this is news, even though Mandelson is the star turn at major right-wing Labour fundraising events, and even though he would undoubtedly be in any Cabinet of Keir Starmer's, probably as Deputy Prime Minister in name, and certainly as such in practice. Even from his cell, Epstein was still making donations to "Petie".

And now, Petie's former live-in lover, Peter Wilby, has been convicted of having had 167 indecent images of children, including 22 of their being subjected to penetration, bestiality or sadism. That provides some context to the fact that Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions when the decision was made not to prosecute Jimmy Savile. In the words of Doughty Street Chambers, on its page about Starmer, now amusingly removed from public view: "He was Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008-2013. As DPP, Keir was responsible for all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales." Therefore, Starmer would have been responsible for the decision not to charge Savile even if he had never set eyes on the file.

But that is in any case inconceivable. We are talking about Jimmy Savile here. That Starmer took the decision not to charge Savile has been repeated all over the place, far beyond parliamentary privilege. Starmer has yet to sue anyone for having made it. Starmer's "experience" as DPP is held up by his supporters as his qualification to be Prime Minister. Yet now they insist that it was a purely titular headship such as might have been given on an unpaid basis to a minor member of the Royal Family. Or, in his heyday, to Jimmy Savile, who would have won a Presidential Election, especially if an arrangement such as the one above had been in place in the Thatcher years.

Due to Savile's fame and connections, of course that decision was not made by anyone other than Starmer, just as of course he was sly enough not to have left a paper trail. Why did Starmer let Savile off? Why is Starmer so dependent on Epstein's closest associate in Britain, indeed one of Epstein's closest associates in the world, who is also an ex-partner of Wilby's? What sort of person therefore wants Starmer to become Prime Minister? The Grand Dragon, Racist Riley, for one. And what does that say about her, and about her class and race war against Mason Greenwood? Those who are hailing Rachel Riley as a feminist heroine should challenge her to define a woman. But Starmer would make her President. He would be too frightened of her not to, although, in all fairness, even she is more famous than he is, whereas she will always be vastly more obscure than either Corbyn or Greenwood. But she wants to make Starmer Prime Minister, so who are the voters to argue? She may as well be Head of State already.

To see the condition of the British politics today is to recall Wordsworth's On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic, "Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade/Of that which once was great is passed away." The Most Serene Republic of Venice lasted exactly 1100 years, from the proclamation of Paolo Lucio Anafesto in 697, to the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797. There were 120 Doges until Napoleon forced the abdication of Ludovico Manin. One hundred and twenty. Eleven hundred years. That is pretty good going.

The people who called Elizabeth II "Elizabeth the Last" are calling Charles III "Charles the Last". Being older than William the Last, I am unlikely to see the reign of George the Last. But assuming that this King lasted 15 to 20 years, and in the unlikely event that they got their way, then that would place me between 60 and 65 at my Cincinnatus moment, when I would be called from my plough, not to be Consul of Rome, but to be the founding Doge of the Most Serene Republic of Great Britain. I am not joking. I have known far too many politicians to want one as Head of State, but if someone had to do it, then I would seek to contest that election. I know of no one else who says that.

I would be more than willing and able to find myself a corno ducale, and a Benedictine nunnery to present me with a new camauro every Easter Monday. As well as a plot on which the Order of Preachers might erect a basilica for my interment and for that of my successors, if I were to be granted a dream of a flock of white doves flying over the auspicious site. The school where I slogged for eight years on the Buildings Committee stands in a swamp, so perhaps it will be there?

Being held at Santi Giovanni e Paolo, were the Doges' Requiem Masses celebrated according to the Dominican Rite? Or were the Doges only buried there, after the Patriarch had done the business in San Marco? But the business according to the Roman Rite, or according to the Aquileian Rite? Ah, yes, the Patriarchate. I could hardly be a Doge without a Patriarch, an office that was for centuries filled in a manner quite singular. I should have so much to consider. Not least, I need to give thought to the form of my and my successors' Fèsta de ƚa Sènsa.

The Patriarchal Throne would not be difficult to fill. Economically left-wing social conservatism will have well and truly come into its own by then, which would be no small part of why I would want the Presidency. The core of its core has always been male Catholics, at least 50 per cent unmarried, and thus eligible to be raised to the Episcopate in the manner of the laymen who were usually ordained only in order to assume the Patriarchate of Venice. They were drawn from among the patricians, and we shall be the patricians then.

That said, I also have priests on whom I could call, and one in particular. Either way, the red biretta topped by a tuft beckons for someone, and we may dare to hope also for the privileges of the Patriarch of Lisbon, such as the right to wear the fanon, the subcinctorium, the falda, and a mitre similar to the Papal Tiara, as well as to be processed on the sedia gestatoria with two flabella, and to be created a Cardinal at the next consistory after appointment. My Confirmation sponsor must be kept in the style to which he is accustomed. But I would be far more likely to offer it to my heavyweight intellectual of a godson.

In any event, though, to be the Patriarch of where, exactly? However regretfully, he would probably have to be seated at London, and two years ago this month, the title of the Primate of the Chaldean Catholic Church was changed from Patriarch of Babylon, to Patriarch of Baghdad. Seated at London, let the Patriarch of Babylon accompany the Doge of the Most Serene Republic of Great Britain. And let the Doge join the President of the French Republic as an Honorary Canon of the Archbasilica Cathedral of the Most Holy Saviour and of Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist in the Lateran.

But the main point is this. For all the weakness of the arguments for the monarchy, the case for change has not been made, and there is no chance or risk of it while Charles III is alive. But if, when the inevitable came, it were the view of enough people that that case had been made, then I would be a candidate for President. I am not aware of anyone else who is saying that, and I am absolutely serious about it. More immediately, we need to take control of the Royal Prerogative, both in order to exercise it, and in order to keep it out of the hands of the most dangerous Pretender to it ever.

When I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in 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.