Monarchy

On 21 April Queen Elizabeth II marks her 90th birthday, the first of our reigning monarchs ever to do so, and it will be a very happy occasion, just as her Diamond Jubilee was in 2012. Five years ago there had been a more sombre milestone for the queen’s eldest son, Charles, Prince of Wales. He passed the mark of 59 years spent as heir to the throne set by his great-great-grandfather, Victoria’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales who became King Edward VII in 1901. The prince will be celebrating his mother’s birthday as enthusiastically as anyone, while oppressed by unmistakable frustration. He’s now 67; the Queen’s mother, the late Queen Mother, lived to 101; when he inherits the throne, he will be well beyond most people’s retirement age.

Watch the videos of 1950s Iraq on YouTube and you glimpse something close to an idyll. It’s true that Pathé News was not big on gritty realism, but history relates that here it was not using a heavily rose-tinted lens; Hugh Trevor-Roper even went so far as to describe Iraq at the time as a Levantine Switzerland. Or you can go to Google Images, tap in ‘1960s Afghan women’ and be offered photographs of a mixed university biology class, and others of young women with short skirts, long hair and smiling faces. This was life under the kings, and knowing what followed is enough to make a grown man weep. But let’s be hard-headed and forward-looking: the creation of new constitutional monarchies is a sensible solution to such clear and present dangers as Isis.

There are already people camping outside St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, to await the birth shortly of another royal baby, the second child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. It is hardly a very exciting event. Babies are born all the time, and there are already quite enough descendants of the Queen to ensure the survival of the Windsor dynasty on the throne of the United Kingdom for a long time to come. Yet there are many people in this country for whom this commonplace event will be more thrilling than the forthcoming general election, even though it could presage the dismemberment of the country itself. The British monarchy continues to enjoy enormous popularity.

When republicans meet, we console ourselves with the thought that our apparently doomed cause will revive. The hereditary principle guarantees that eventually a dangerous fool will accede to a position he could never have attained by merit, we chortle. With Charles III, we have just the fool we need. I don’t laugh any more. Britain faces massive difficulties. It can do without an unnecessary crisis brought by a superstitious and vindictive princeling who is too vain to accept the limits of constitutional monarchy. If you want a true measure of the man, buy Edzard Ernst’s memoir A Scientist in Wonderland, which the Imprint Academic press have just released. It would be worth reading if the professor had never been the victim of a royal vendetta.

Her Majesty’s Loyal Press Corps are on the verge of revolt. Minutes of a recent meeting of the Press Gallery Committee - seen by The Spectator - show that a Republican motion to ditch the Loyal Toast (in which Westminster hacks and assembled guests, from the PM down, raise a glass to the British sovereign) is being considered. Minutes from the July meeting of the Committee state: (ii) Loyal Toast: the committee considered the proposal to discontinue the loyal toast at Press Gallery lunches which had been deferred from a previous meeting. After discussion it was agreed that the chairman should take soundings amongst colleagues and report back to the next meeting, when a decision would be taken. Westminster insiders are horrified.

Athens This grimy semi-Levantine ancient city has its beauty spots, with childhood memories indelibly attached. There is a turn-of-the-century apartment building across the street from my house where in 1942 or ’43 I watched a daughter and wife scream in horror from their balcony as three nondescript assassins executed a man as he bent over to get into his chauffeur-driven car. His name was Kalyvas and he was a minister in the Vichy-like Greek government of the time. He was bald and from my vantage point I saw the three red spots as the bullets entered his skull. His wife and daughter wore black from that day onwards. The daughter was a teenager — and a pretty blonde one at that. I was six and have never forgotten them or their screams of anguish.

How can we stop Australian politicians from touching up members of our Royal Family, in the manner of a libidinous BBC Radio disc jockey? If you remember, the former Prime Minister Paul Keating once groped the Queen, without even having first invited her out for a drink. Now the current PM, a man called Tony Abbott, has draped his meaty arm around the Duke of Cambridge, probably while making some over-familiar or even vulgar aside about his wife. “Punched above your weight there, you sly old bugger,” or something similarly grotesque. Obviously the Royals will need to visit the Antipodes from time to time, to let them know that we still care. But shouldn’t we in future send less senior figures who will mind less the predatory pawing.

Only a few hours before the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge landed in Sydney for the start of their much-hyped royal Australian visit, Barry O’Farrell, the popular Premier of New South Wales, stunned the nation by resigning. His reason? He couldn’t remember having quaffed a bottle of wine. (No ordinary wine, mind you, but a bottle of 1959 Penfolds Grange, valued at around GBP 1,700.) In years to come, no doubt among Barry’s many regrets will be the fact that he didn’t get to hob nob on the harbour with the glam royal couple. A timely coincidence, because what links these two events goes to the heart of why Australia’s constitutional monarchy is so popular. The polls are unequivocal.

It’s great news that this summer will see the launch of Britain’s biggest-ever warship, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, built on the Clyde and weighing 65,000 tons. This beast will be carrying Merlins, Chinooks, Apache and 250 troops, and also features a ‘Highly Mechanised Weapon Handling System’, which I don’t quite understand the meaning of but definitely makes me aroused. But couldn’t the Powers That Be have come up with a more original name? I love the royal family and everything, but how many things do we have to name after them? Most recently, a year or so ago it was announced that they’d come up with a name for our part of Antarctica – and they’d decided on ‘Queen Elizabeth Land’.

Prince Harry’s disdain for the media is well documented; but it was William who got grumpy today, telling Guardian journalist Robert Booth: ‘Why don't you put your notebook down and give us a hand with the sandbags?’ Booth offered to help: ‘But when your reporter agreed to help, aides stepped in and said it would not be possible due to a lack of the right sort of clothing.’ Typical health and safety mumbo jumbo, etcetera. The royal PR operation is a slick machine these days. Opportunities are rarely missed, which is why the princes were up bright and early this morning to get in on the action.

When I interviewed Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former president of France, for my biography of Margaret Thatcher, I asked him why, when she lunched with him at the Elysée Palace for the first time, he had been served before her: she had been offended. M. Giscard explained that no slight had been intended. It was a matter of protocol — the president is the head of state, the British prime minister only the head of government. ‘You must remember,’ he added, ‘that the president is in the line of sovereigns.’ I recalled these words when reading about President Hollande and his amorous adventures in his helmet. To the British, it is a puzzle that French presidents are protected from the media scrutiny we inflict on our own leaders.

These are troubled times for Princess Michael of Kent. Austerity has hit Kensington Palace. ‘We’ve cut back dramatically,’ she tells the Times. ‘I mean we never go out to dinner unless we go to somebody’s house. We never go to restaurants. That’s too extravagant.’ It sounds just ghastly. And, I regret to say, that the princess travels in less style than she used to: ‘I love Easyjet. It’s the only direct route to Biarritz. We always fly tourist-class anyway in Europe.’ Although it may sound like the Baroness Marie Christine Anna Agnes Hedwig Ida is enduring Dickensian privations, she does say: ‘for long-haul, we go club.’ Phew! I was about to call for a whip-round.