Bona Vacantia

It must be Polari for something. But what, and why? Of course Polari grew out of Mediterranean Lingua Franca, which in turned owed much to Venetian, and as the future founding Doge of the Most Serene Republic of Great Britain, I have between 15 and 20 years until the King died, meaning that I would take office in my early sixties. I am absolutely serious. As set out below, I do not want to abolish the monarchy. But I would seek to contest any Presidential Election that might be held soon after the conclusion of the present reign.

My magazine, my thinktank, and much else besides, will be long-established by then. Not least under their direction, the outworking over another generation of the Postliberalism of which John Milibank long ago called me the "prophet" will be the public doctrine, if we had put in the effort to make it so, as I for one have been doing for decades and will do until my last breath. Already disbelieved and derided by absolutely everyone, my stalkers will be dead or extremely old. All my enemies entertainingly hate each other, and even they do not believe what they are saying. There has never been anyone who sincerely imagined that I had committed any criminal offence. Tell me a name. The last gasp of this whole carry on, or even Carry On, depends on a suspended Police Officer who has disappeared off the face of the Earth.

I threaten no return to the previous republic on this soil. Happy Thanksgiving for the fact that the Puritans left England. Elvis Presley is sitting here maxing out his Just Eat and Uber Eats accounts for fear that Cliff Richard might still try and meet him. "Damn, boy," he tells me, "I thought he was dead." While I always hold this Chestertonian Thanksgiving, the bus strike kept my crippled frame out of Durham city centre this year. Jamie Driscoll is not yet Mayor down here, when the terms of participation in his Total Transport Network will make such a dispute impossible. But when normal service has been resumed, then normal service will be resumed. Waiting and working for that, I have already missed this year's Book Festival.

Durham Book Festival. The Royal County Hotel. They sound sedate, do they not? Yet many years ago, that was where David Goodhart introduced me to Malbec, so blame him. The net migration figures that have been published today are from when Suella Braverman was Home Secretary. Danny Kruger was Political Secretary to Boris Johnson, who abolished the requirement that vacancies in Britain be advertised first in Britain, and who wanted visa-free travel with India, the most populous country in the world. That wing of the Conservative Party supported Liz Truss, who pretty much wanted to abolish immigration controls altogether, as is the logic of the political choice, such as all economic arrangements are, to have a "free" market. Such a market has to be in goods, services, capital, and labour, which means people.

Culturally, the closest thing to a British republic is in Ireland, and how is that looking tonight? In London, when a million people marched peacefully for an armistice on Armistice Day, around a thousand rioted at the Cenotaph, injuring nine Police Officers, as had always been the intention from the decision to go equipped with bladed articles but not with firearms. They had not gone to shoot Hamas. They had gone to stab the Police. We are the 76 per cent for a reason, and in any case there now is a ceasefire. Tonight in Dublin, after one Algerian has committed a heinous crime, look what we see from the same people who rioted in London, and who will march there again on Sunday, since only "Tommy Robinson" wants to attend that event.

Such are the people who valorise Geert Wilders, whose sort the centrists wanted to keep legislating for us periodically in the European Council of Ministers, and permanently in the European Parliament. As with their support for the Azov Battalion and its ilk, to whose legislative will they also wish to subject us by admitting Ukraine to the European Union while reacceding the United Kingdom to it, they demonstrate that centrism and right-wing populism are both con tricks, designed to sell the same extreme and unpopular economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war.

In reality, when the issue of immigration is researched in depth, at least in Britain, then concern turns out to be about the pressure on public services. 10 years after The British Dream, whatever else mass immigration may have done, it has definitely not, as David feared, weakened support for social democracy itself. So far from it, in fact, that the proponents of such either have to be starved of coverage, or have to be subjected to a torrent of hysterical defamation and abuse. People will then vote instead for the unpopulists, who do not in fact disagree with the eccentrists on anything very much at all. The reverse also applies, since Anywheres are in fact Somewheres, with a distinct culture and with many close communities, and since the sheer size of the popular majorities for everything from publicly owned utilities, to the ceasefire in Gaza, must include the majority of both.

Although the particular application of bona vacantia in the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall has never been a secret, attention to it does not help the cause of bridging the divide between Somewheres and Anywheres on the basis of their common interests. Two of the five poorest wards in England are in Liverpool, while another is in Manchester, and many other parts of that old County Palatine are comparable, while Cornwall is one of the 10 poorest regions in Northern Europe. As is County Durham and the Tees Valley, although I lived for nearly three months in the constituency of Stockton North, never leaving it once. I lost three stone, and I received more education than at any other time in my life. I shall always remember it fondly.

Reform of bona vacantia is necessary, since 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, the Online Safety Act, and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act.

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. 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.

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, Johnson also showed tendencies in that direction. So the Deep State had to get rid of the pair of them. 

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 Keir 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.