It’s a boy! Advice for the royal baby from James Delingpole

Congratulations, Baby Windsor. You have just been born a subject of Her Britannic Majesty (as it used to say on the passports) and have therefore won life’s lottery.  Actually, given the state of the nation and the economy, maybe ‘won life’s dog-eared scratchcard’ is more the phrase juste. Still, you’ve done amazingly well. Thanks to the freakiest odds imaginable you have, merely by the accident of being conceived by the right couple, leapfrogged to the covetable position of third in line to the British throne.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that it comes with a certain amount of baggage. Problem one: you’re a constititutional monarch. This means that when eventually your dad pops his clogs, you won’t be able to do nearly so much of the cool stuff as you might have done had you been born to the same position 500 years earlier. You won’t be able to have people’s heads chopped off on a whim, nor expand your territory by force, nor up the tax rate whenever you’re feeling skint.