Petrified, actually. Panic-stricken. Trembling with fear. Although perhaps it wasn’t exactly the kind of fear he was hoping to induce.
HRH feels strongly that ‘our planet’ is rapidly heading for extinction, what he calls a “tipping point”. And we have only ourselves to blame:
“Humans have taken too many fish from the sea. We have cleared too many trees, burnt too much fossil fuel, and produced too much waste. The damage we are doing is no longer incremental but exponential, and we are fast reaching a tipping point…”
I’ll say one thing for HRH: all that expensive education didn’t go to waste, as it did with his brother. So it’s good to see that he can use, even imprecisely, words like incremental and exponential. But I still wonder how Will pictures that tipping point.
I’m sure he sees it as fires of hell fanned by hurricanes, strengthened by eruptions and earthquakes and not put out by floods. In that case, if scare-mongering was his intention, he certainly succeeded with me.
However, unlike him, I’m not scared for ‘our planet’. Over the past millions of years, it has shown an admirable ability to fend for itself. What I’m scared for, perhaps also unlike him, is the future of our monarchy.
For if the history of politics teaches us anything, it’s that redundant institutions tend to die out. My mortal fear is that the upcoming generations of our royal family will kill off the monarchy by making it trivialised, vulgarised and therefore redundant.
Each time any members of ‘the Firm’, other than the Queen and her daughter, open their mouths on any subject whatsoever, I break out in sweat, my limbs begin to shake, my mouth goes dry.
For practically every statement they make regurgitates every woke fad imaginable and spits it out in a constant stream of vulgarity. That by itself wouldn’t be hopelessly deadly if they were the only ones spouting such rubbish. But they aren’t, far from it.
Practically every cabinet member, most MPs of whatever affiliation, most articles in most papers, every TV channel, every pronouncement by yet another functionally illiterate ‘celebrity’ or ‘influencer’ can amply satisfy whatever appetite we may have for woke effluvia.
We don’t need our royals for that, which is bound to raise the inevitable question of what we need them for, full stop. I can only answer that question the way I always do.
The monarchy is the axis around which Britain’s constitutional history revolves. In a world where governments come and go, fashions change, and the world is in constant flux, our monarchy is a factor of constancy. It stands above quotidian politics to tie together generations past, present and future.
To be effective in that capacity the royals must emanate an aura of grandeur, mystique, certain unworldliness if you will. We must always see that they are different from us and, by implication, better than us. If we don’t, if we perceive the royals as being no different from other ‘celebrities’, then their whole mission is compromised, irrevocably so.
They become redundant and therefore superfluous. If that’s the impression they convey, then the republican spirit, never dormant in the more upmarket parts of Britain, can become fully awake and unstoppable.
Whenever the royals try to ingratiate themselves to the woke elites of Islington and Notting Hill, they are on a losing wicket. Woke means socialist, and socialists hate, congenitally and viscerally, the monarchy and everything it represents. No amount of rubbish about tipping points is going to change that.
The more of their mystique the royals cede trying to sound like average Guardian readers, the more perilous the state of the monarchy. People should look up to them, not regard them with disdain.
As to the face value of the meteorological situation that makes Will so despondent, he should make the effort of reading a few serious books on the subject. He’ll find that there’s little reason to see all this climate change brouhaha as anything more than a woke hoax, an expression of ideological discontent.
It’s one arrow in the quiver of hostility to our civilisation, with each trying to kill it by a million pinpricks. And the monarchy is a statutory brace holding the remnants of our civilisation together. The upshot of this is that, if Will doesn’t have anything intelligent to say, the best thing he can do is shut up.
Who knows, that way he may still have a crown to bequeath to Prince George of Cambridge.
“Over the past millions of years, it has shown an admirable ability to fend for itself. ”
Planet Earth has an attribute of a living being. Has a built-in regulating mechanism to maintain a homeostasis [equilibrium] necessary for life to flourish. Never too hot, never too cold. Etc.
While there is some value in BertE’s claim that Earth has homeostatic properties, there is no basis (as far as I am aware) for believing that anything directs them to stabilise the Earth environment in a region acceptable for Life (as we know it).
It seems quite possible that the environment could settle at an equilibrium point somewhat above (or below) what we are accustomed to and outside the range of all or almost all present-day life forms.
Indeed, having learned (from history) to be a pessimist, that might be the most desirable outcome. A new range of thermotolerant life forms might then evolve permitting a long period of future evolution in the absence of humans, surely the most destructive and disagreeable life-forms that have ever been alive.
As for what you say about the monarchy, you find me in complete agreement. We need it to ensure the future and it needs to bee above – far above – woke mantras. Dukes — take note!
Our Sunday sermon was on the hierarchy of Heaven and that while on earth we are still part of that royal hierarchy and should act appropriately. The priest compared our role to that of the royal family: that we should be above petty things and set a good example. All I could think was that he was referring to a royal family from generations long ago, and not today’s woke imbeciles.
He was probably referring to the institution, not the individuals. But of course the trouble is that the individuals may well destroy the institution. But your priest sounds as if thinks about politics deeply, certainly more so than most of our clergy, especially at the top of the hierarchy.
I would rather live in a republic than a parliamentary monarchy in which the majority of the population despises the royals. The persistence of moribund institutions (The Crown, C of E, House of Lords) is simply not healthy for Britain.
If they are moribund (and they may well be), then so is Britain. For Britain is defined by traditional institutions more than any other country. The island will exist as a geographical entity but, without those moribund institutions, the nomenclature would be the only British thing about it.