Monarchy

Friday

Peter Hoskin

A day when politics is not the story

This, it has to be said, is not much of a day for politics. Although the world’s laser-like attention will be focussed on Westminster, it will not be on the operations of our Parliament or its actors, but on Westminster Abbey and the marriage, of course, of Prince William and Kate Middleton. The cameras might pass for a moment over David Cameron, or Ed Miliband, or Nick Clegg. But even their best morning suits will not compete, you fancy, with the collected fascinators and finery on display — let alone with the wedding dress itself. We shall be marking proceedings on Coffee House with video, with archive posts and with

Thursday

Clarissa Tan

The Royal Wedding (extended expat version)

Last month, dressed as a town crier, the head of the British Club in Singapore, Sean Boyle, visited the offices of every major newspaper in the country. Accompanied by an entourage also in fancy dress, he declaimed that the British Club would be celebrating the nuptials of Prince William and Kate Middleton in a festival that would last 10 days. The reception to his announcement was warm. An editor of the Tamil Murasu, the newspaper that serves Singapore’s ethnic Indian population, left the newsroom to return dressed in traditional Indian costume, to pose for photos with Boyle (see above). The team at the Berita Harian, the Malay-language daily, gave the

Peter Hoskin

The Royal Wedding by numbers

I know, I know, it’s deeply unromantic to anticipate tomorrow’s Royal Wedding through the prism of opinion polling. But as no one ever said that a political blog has to be romantic — and as there are some quite noteworthy findings among all the data — we thought we’d put together a quick round-up for CoffeeHousers. So here goes: 1) The guest list. There has, I’m sure you’ve noticed, been quite some hubbub over the fact the Gordon Brown and Tony Blair haven’t been invited to the wedding — especially in view of the Syrian ambassador’s invitation, since withdrawn. But some new polling from YouGov — highlighted by PoliticsHome —

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Wedding Dog That Barked

That, Watson, was the remarkable thing about the Royal Wedding: the dog barked and still no-one heard it. You can scarcely open a paper this week without encountering yet another thumbsucker on the future of the monarchy. Most of these, such as this New York Times effort from John Burns, suggest the old ship needs urgent repairs. Frequently this will be accompanied by yet another piece complaining that the press is devoting far too much attention to the whole anachronistic palaver. Someone, somewhere will complain this week that they’ve yet to meet anyone at all interested in Prince William’s marriage. This will echo Pauline Kael’s complaint that she’d never encountered

Friday

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: the Queen’s Birthday

It was, I’m sure CoffeeHousers noticed, the Queen’s 85th Birthday yesterday. So here, as a belated commemoration, is an item from the archives that is a even more archival than usual. You see, it’s an article that was written on the event of the Queen’s 80th Birthday in 2006 — and it looks back at the issue of The Spectator that was published when the Queen was actually born, in 1926. Mary Wakefield, our deputy editor, is the author: The week the Queen was born, Mary Wakefield, The Spectator, 8 April 2006 It was press day at The Spectator when Queen Elizabeth II was born. The printers had set the

Saturday

Nicola Shulman

King of spin

Draw two two-inch triangles, tip to tip, one on top of the other. A little way down the left flank of the upper triangle, take a perpendicular line out to an inch, then turn your pencil at a right angle and continue another inch. Repeat on the other side. Next, draw two short, splayed lines down from the base of the lower triangle. Finally, put an acute accent, an inch long, about two inches above the whole. What have you got? According to Dr David Starkey, who performs this trick at schools all over the country, Henry VIII in 13 lines. Apparently he is recognisable in this form as far

Philip Ziegler

A fate worse than death

Hugo Vickers has already produced a well-documented and balanced biography of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. To follow this with the Duchess of Windsor is as bold a left-and-right as one could ask for; like writing biographies of Shylock and Antonio or Cain and Abel. ‘I will go to my grave,’ wrote the lady-in-waiting Frances Campbell-Preston, ‘trying to convince people that the Queen Mother did not hate the Duchess of Windsor.’ ‘Hate’ is a strong word; but the Duchess certainly hated the Queen Mother and Queen Elizabeth was as much as anyone responsible for the fact that the Duchess was never fully accepted by the royal family. The subtitle to

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Cameron takes it to the councils

Ignore what your council is telling you. So says no less a personage than the Prime Minister of our country, speaking at one of his freewheelin’ roadshow events this afternoon. Cameron may have been referring specifically to the red tape being wrapped around Royal Wedding street parties, but it’s still a pretty pugnacious point for a PM to make. Here’s the full quotation, courtesy of the superb PoliticsHome: “I hope people are able to join in and celebrate and I am very much saying today that if people want to have a street party, don’t listen to people who say ‘it is all bureaucracy and health and safety and you

Monday

James Forsyth

A princely problem

Tonight’s Six o’clock news had a long package on Prince Andrew that ended with Laura Kuenssberg reporting from Downing Street on the government’s attitude to the prince. The fact that the government is now so much part of this story is due to an unforced error on its part.   It was the briefing yesterday about how if more came out then Andrew would have to resign as trade envoy that pushed the government right into the middle of this sorry story. This set journalistic hares running and had everyone demanding to know what the government’s position was. The government, which had got involved in this story more through cock-up

Peter Hoskin

The politics of Prince Andrew

Uh-oh, the Prime Minster has “full confidence” in Prince Andrew as a UK trade envoy – the sort of endorsement that often means the direct opposite. In this case, though, I suspect that the line is more a hasty attempt to defuse some of the tension that has been building on this matter over the past few days. Only this morning, a Downing Street source told the Beeb that the Prince could be ejected from the role should any more revelations surface. Another suggested that “there won’t be many tears shed if he resigns.” And then there’s the senior Tory putting it about that “there appears to be no discernible

Sunday

Alex Massie

David Cameron arranged Prince William’s Wedding to Distract Attention from his Plan to RAPE Britain

Oh dear. That is to say, three cheers for this comedy post by the New Statesman’s Laurie Penny. It turns out there is scarcely any limit to David Cameron’s deviousness. I mean, consider all this: Over the next two and a half years, a full calendar of bread and circuses has been scheduled to keep the British public happy and obedient while the government puts its economic shock doctrine into effect. This year, it’s the Wedding of Mass Distraction; next year it’s the Diamond Jubilee and after that the Olympics. The timing is a gift for any government attempting to push through punitive and unpopular reforms – the chance to

Saturday

James Forsyth

Princes and politics don’t mix

Max Hasting’s essay in the Daily Mail about the dangers for the monarchy of Prince Charles becoming king is an important moment. Hastings, who is very much part of the establishment, is reflecting a view that many hold in private: that Prince Charles’s desire to advance his political views is incompatible with a modern constitutional monarchy. As Hastings puts it, ‘he is so set in his ways, so accustomed to not being contradicted — because those who argue with him are swiftly expelled from his counsels — that I am convinced that if he becomes King he will persist in trying to save the world, and thus precipitate a crisis.’

Friday

David Blackburn

From the archives: The Royal Marriage Question

Like father, like son. Prince William took his time to propose to Kate Middleton, almost as long as his father took to take the plunge in 1981. The press brayed on both occasions. Here’s what Auberon Waugh made of the Prince of Wales’ dithering over Diana. It was tragically prescient. The Royal marriage question, The Spectator, 10 January 1981. In the death of Princess Alice of Athlone at 97 last Saturday the Queen lost not only first cousin twice removed but also a great aunt by marriage. Under the circumstances, it might seem humane to allow a period of time to elapse for her to get over this double shock

Thursday

Paul Richards

How to pay for the Royal wedding? Simple: public subscription

Now that we have a date in the diary, we can begin the traditional rites and customs on the path to the Royal Wedding. These traditions stretch back to Queen Victoria – street parties, pageants, commemorative china, bunting and flags, and an almighty row about how much it’s all costing. The cost of the monarchy is a perpetual controversy, given new impetus by any major monarchical occasion. Already, David Cameron’s decree that the date will be a public holiday is causing disquiet among some business leaders, who will lose a day’s trade. As Guido Fawkes points out, the additional day-off, coupled with Good Friday and Easter Monday, will make for

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Who will benefit from the Royal wedding?

David Cameron is playing down the effect the Royal Wedding will have on the 5th May elections, especially the AV referendum. Fleet Street’s having none of it however. On the one hand, Benedict Brogan can already hear the pops of champagne corks in the No to AV campaign offices. He reasons: ‘One consequence of the Royal wedding will be to make it even more difficult for AV supporters to get their campaign motoring in time for the referendum.’ On the other, Alex Barker makes the case for the Lib Dems’ Yes to AV campaign. He has a three point-plan, centring on low turnout following reduced campaign time. This, he thinks,

David Blackburn

A Royal Holiday

Kate Middleton and Prince William will marry on Friday 29th April at Westminster Abbey. I can scarcely contain my indifference, even at this early stage; but congratulations to them all the same. Number 10 has confirmed that the occasion will be marked by a public holiday. There is, you see, nothing like a right Royal bash and the darling buds of May to dispel the privations of austerity ahead of awkward elections and a referendum on 5th May. Then again, an Arctic breeze and intermittent hail will have the opposite effect.  

Monday

Alex Massie

Monarchy is Better Than Republicanism, Part CXVI

Meanwhile, elsewhere in whimsy the nice folks at Foreign Policy asked me to write a piece about Prince William’s engagement. Somehow this ended up with another modest proposal: the United States should ditch the Presidency, join the Commonwealth and become a parliamentary democracy. You know, like Canada. They have the trappings of royalty already, but none of the benefits: Last year, Peggy Noonan, the American conservative commentator and former presidential speechwriter, complained that President Barack Obama lacked some of the presence that a good head of state requires. She imagines “a good president as sitting at the big desk and reaching out with his long arms and holding on to

Saturday

Robert Stewart

Ride on in majesty

Governments in early modern England, having no standing army nor a civil service to speak of, required the consent of the governed. Authority had to be ‘culturally constructed’. That is the starting-point for Kevin Sharpe’s monumental investigation into royal branding in the age of the Tudors and Stuarts. In the first volume of a projected trilogy, Selling the Tudor Monarchy, he argued that the Tudors made the person of the monarch more important than administrative procedures in establishing royal authority. Elizabeth, in particular, fixed in the national memory by her portraits, played down political divisions and ‘privileged her image over actions and events’, making the sovereign the sacred ‘unifying embodiment

Saturday

Dan Jones

The match that sparked the Civil War

There are turbulent marriages. And then there are turbulent marriages in which the husband ends up getting beheaded on a stage. This book describes the latter. One doesn’t normally need to encourage publishers to hyperbole, but in the case of Katie Whitaker’s subtitle, there might have been a case for giving it a bit more welly. The story begins with a prissy 15-year-old French princess being taken to England, to a husband whom she’d never seen. It ends with that husband losing his crown and his head to Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarian taleban. The sad coda is the princess living out her days back in France, estranged from most of her

Monday

James Forsyth

Cameron, Villa and the succession

The Prime Minister is, as we know an Aston Villa fan. So we can expect him to be disappointed at Martin O’Neill’s departure. On his trip to Birmingham the other week, Cameron’s support for Villa caused the PM to, as the phrase has it, misspeak. He told the Birmingham Post that with “the Governor of the Bank of England as a supporter, the next King of England and the current Prime Minister, [Aston Villa] got a good set” of fans in high places. But his reference to the next King of England being a Villa fan will raise a few eyebrows as it is Prince William — not Prince Charles