(Austerity Number)
Daily Mail on top form last Saturday with the astonishing revelation that former King Charles bonk Susan George used to imitate people while they were, you know, at it. In this rare video frame taken for purposes of blackmail by MI6, Ms George is allegedly imitating Clint Eastwood and asking C3PO if he “feels lucky, punk”.
If you ever despair about Daily Mailapropisms, just be thankful that occasionally they can be unintentionally amusing.
Unfortunately, the trouble with some people is they just can’t see the funny side of anything. In its continuing attempt to be dragged muttering into the Twentieth Century, the Maily Smellynaff decided to play the Slave Card. That’s like the Race Card on smack cocaine:
I well remember an adversary at University yelling at me that Churchill was “a Jew-baiting bigot who despised the working class”. My response – to the predictable sound effects of Trotskyite hissing – was to say, “In 1932, most Brit, Russian and American goys were anti-semitic, and in 1926 a good sixty per cent of the population was anti the General Strike. But if Churchill was a hater of Jews and workers, why was his key wartime secretary Lizzie Layton from poor stock and his most valued Minister of War Supplies Lord Beaverbrook, a Jew?”
I don’t despise many people – hardly any at all. But I do detest the ideologue of high IQ and his or her ability to “score” a radical point by pretending that the past is merely the present with fifty years knocked off. They know better – and their conscious denial of that is an act of outrageous hypocrisy.
Examine the idiotically assumptive nature of the phrase “rocky road to reparation”. Why is there a need for the Royals to make reparation? Why is a three-year study of royal slavery links getting under way? It is 224 years since a distant relative of Charles III – the future William IV – stood up in the House of Lords and made a passionate speech in defence of slavery. He was defending not just an assumption that slavery was a “norm” (and had been since the demise of the Roman Empire) but also its importance as a cornerstone of the sea-trade in human beings that typified the British Empire. He was a man of his time – no more, and no less.
All of this ignores the empirical reality that Great Britain was the first country to abolish slavery, the first one to make the practice illegal…..and the only Empire in history to give back all of the Empire to its indigenous peoples.
“Now whatever you do chaps, don’t mention the philanthropy….I did a couple of times, but I think I got away with it”
The “enquiry” is going to be carried out by PhD student Camilla de Koning. She describes herself as “historian early-modern, slavery and royalty, kinship, Suriname – passion for depicting individual colonial lifeways”. So don’t expect too much objective insight.
Footnote: The demand for slaves during the Transatlantic slave trade was fuelled by the availability of a supply chain which involved African rulers and tradesmen who made a fortune out of selling people. The slave trade contributed to the expansion of the most powerful West African kingdoms such as Mali and Ghana, as the business became one of the main sources of foreign exchange for many years. According to Nigerian author Tunde Obadina: “When Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, it not only had to contend with opposition from white slavers but also from African rulers who had become accustomed to wealth gained from selling slaves or from taxes collected on slaves passed through their domain“.
Now we’ve established clearly my view that this is no time for self-pitying narcissists to deflect attention away from what an Almighty mess 98% of us (including BLMers, LGBTQers, Hollywood locksteppers and the President/Prime Minister of your choice) are in gdp and debt-wise – see yesterday’s Slogpost – I thought it might be good if we moved on to what is Now&Next when it comes to Yer Royles in general and the moral hazards of being a 21st Century monarch in particular.
Not only does C3PO have problematic siblings and a rebellious younger son, he also has disturbingly close royal-seal connections to all three security services…and a naive commitment to the overpopulation and Green agendas of the international Left as a whole and the billionaire élites who flock like so many psycho-sheep to Davos. Even apart from such issues, he faces calls to become defender of all faiths rather than just Christianity (I have no problem with that so long as he agrees to be defender of all tolerant faiths) and must have cottoned on by now to the reality of a Britain wherein demands for privilege don’t emerge solely from the upper classes. His son and heir gives the strong impression of being a kneejerk supporter of all things “liberal”, and Charles III isn’t far behind him. As things worsen both in terms of social cohesion and economic crisis, the new King needs to steer a clear line of objectivity between being Establishment at one minute and renegade at the next where his citizen subjects often hold a diametrically opposite view.
I’m thinking as I write particularly in terms of Charles keeping shtum on issues like civil rights – a free press, no banking interference in elected officials’ policies, and no attacks on base-level welfare such as the State Pension – while also accepting – even actively supporting – the hypocritical liberal orthodoxy on subjects as varied as mass immigration, rising abuse of young and prepubertal women, reflexive support of EUNATO disasters like the Ukraine War, increasingly blatant attempts to drag the UK back into the clutches of Brussels, and the insane minefield of gender transition.
[Just to highlight that last point, the inimitable Roger Lewis writes to inform me that ‘NASA will spend about $52 billion to search for and destroy the Pioneer 10 probe, launched into space 50 years ago and carrying a message to intelligent life forms that was recognized as transphobic’]
While reading for a degree in History and Politics at University, I took a keen interest during the late 1960s in Charles’ path to maturity. At Oxbridge, he’d taken part in risqué satire, expressed a devotion to the Goons, and given a light-hearted interview to Jack de Manio that charmed the great majority of those who heard it. At that moment, he seemed to epitomise the new “swinging” Britain.
But it was a long wait for the throne, and with the passing years and changing values, he seemed to me to grow more superficial, far less sensitive and rather too gobby. On becoming engaged to Diana, when she told the interviewer, “We’re in love, of course”, Charles adopted a smug expression and added, “Whatever love means”. This was a massive foot-in-mouth moment, not helped by his increasing capacity for reading one book and then prodding people in the chest about it. In terms of ability to comprehend and then assess a complex problem, he gives away the essentially shallow nature of his understanding. This is confirmed by many who know him: one I knew well in the early 1970s (who met Charles through his sister) told me at the time, “He’s something of a meddler and a flyleaf reader…a bit sort of Reader’s Digest…he doesn’t cope well with being contradicted.” This inflexibility has, over the years I think, become pomposity, and a tendency to see subjects about which he feels strongly as no longer open to debate.
Charles numbers l and ll suffered from the same ideological fixation.
To be fair, he faces a near impossible task once crowned. He lacks the guile and subtlety of his great-grandfather George V, and the upright humility of his grandfather George VI….and those with the real power in our era won’t be backward in coming forward about inviting him into their camp: when Baron Rothschild feels able to poke Charles (literally) in the chest with all the media present, others will not be far behind. For a British King to be the puppet of evil men would be the beginning of the end of our monarchy: God help us if C3PO winds up as a latter-day Ludendorff.
Having said that, so far the clunking of the metal ring on the head while avoiding the taxi-door ears is not exactly being treated across the World as the A-list event of all time. Stars like Harry Styles, Adele and Robbie Williams all declined to perform, along with the Spice Girls and Elton John. Elton’s refusal is understandable given his adoration for fag-hag Diana, but it goes deeper than that: according to The Sun, one royal source confirmed that organisers for the coronation concert were “working against the clock to pull together an exciting line-up….but have hit a series of challenges.”
If I was Charles III, I’d be looking to quietly accept this degree of kneejerk rejection, and asking an older generation of stars personally if they are willing – and enthusiastic about – helping to keep respect for aged wisdom alive by putting in a lifetime performance to make the Coronation a celebration of Britain’s unique level of influential music over more than 60 years. Charles is 74 years old: it really would be a lot better if he accepted that grandad leaping about to the execrable lyrics of Lola Brooke, Chow Lee, TiaCorine, Cash Cobain, Lana Del Rey or Billie Eilish would be a risible start to his reign.
Maybe the time has come to ask: is this an extended Bank Holiday fest of rock n roll we’re dealing with here, or the acceptance of a King who could so easily lose his way?
So it is that we end with the same Brailly Mail that opened proceedings:
Oh dear. This is an outcome his mother would never have countenanced. OK; there’s a deal of innovation there – King Father not Queen Mother, maybe as a sop to either the misogynist SS units or the Feminist covens…who knows? – but for Heaven’s sake, the bugger’s not even in the job yet, and already he’s looking for his Get out of Jail Free card.
Sadly, it gets worse: Charles’s plans for a ‘diverse’ Coronation represent the start of, we are told, what one leading constitutionalist describes as the start of a ‘transition from the magical monarchy to the public service monarchy’. That is nonsense: magic has nothing to do with public service, and vice versa. Take away the quasi-miraculous nature of monarchy, and many doors once opened will slam shut. And far be it for me to remind anyone, but it did not take ‘diversity’ for either the late Queen (or her parents) to devote themselves to public service.
Few things irk me more than the contemporary obsession with ‘diversity’. What on Earth is the connection between social harmony and cultural diversity if one social group thinks it is absolutely fine to rape and groom 11 year old girls or throw male homosexuals of a roof, but the rest of the community – a massive majority – finds such things abhorrent?
None of this auto-didact attitude among the Royal Family bodes well. The last thing I want is Royal puppets of the genocidal maniacs; but equally, siding with those happy to put innocent primary school children and drag queens together in the process of everyday sex education is complete insanity.
Are we seriously suggesting here that the only choice left to us is between Caligula’s sexual insanity and the almost infinite blood-lust of Nero?
The Slog 