It is a complete fantasy that the British monarchy is supposed to be neutral in all matters. What would be the point of that? If, for example, it could not intervene to prevent the despoilment of our built environment, then there really would be no purpose at all to it. But such is not the case.

Leaving aside the mistakes and misfortunes of his own life (which have absolutely nothing to do with the institution as such), Prince Charles is either on the wrong track or just plain wrong when it comes to syncretism, and Greenery, and “alternative medicine”, and the Dalai Lama. But he is right about an awful lot more. And that makes him the voice of huge numbers of people who have none in the supposedly more legitimate parliamentary process, of which the monarch, complete with a power of veto in the defence of certain interests not exactly dear to the hearts of New Labour or the New Tories (and therefore now impossible to defend by means of voting), is properly, but not currently, an integral part.

“But we don’t want to go back to the Divine Right of Kings, do we?” You can’t go back to something that never existed in the first place. Didn’t Charles I believe in the Divine Right of Kings? No, he did not. Or at least he certainly expressed no such view at his grotesque “trial” pursuant to a Bill of Attainder, and before eighty of his carefully selected parliamentary and military enemies under a second-rate lawyer, John Bradshaw, created “Lord President” because all the proper judges had fled London rather than have anything to do with the wretched proceedings.

There, Charles declared repeatedly that, by denying the authority of the “court” to try him, he was simply upholding the law as it then existed, including the liberties of the English people and the parliamentary institutions of the English State. No law permitted the trial of the monarch, he argued. On the contrary, the law of treason then in force provided for exactly the opposite, namely that any attack on the monarch’s person was itself an offence. Simply as a matter of fact, he was right.

And the subsequent behaviour of the Cromwellian regime fully vindicated him. In sillier circles, Cromwell’s imposition of the greatest tyranny in English (never mind Irish) history is termed “the English Revolution”.

In fact, of course, it long preceded the emergence of any industrial proletariat and is wholly inexplicable in Marxist terms, just as is the very existence of any Marxist movement in, say, the Russia of 1917, or Albania, or China at least until very recent years, or Korea, or Vietnam, or Nepal, or Bengal, or Sri Lanka, or Ethiopia, or Zimbabwe, or Uganda, or Rwanda, South Africa, or Cuba, or Peru, or Bolivia, or … well, make your on list. At their respective heights of Communism, certainly Spain, and arguably also Italy and even France, were standing contradictions of the whole theory. If there is any truth at all in the Marxist analysis of history, then these things simply cannot be. I think we all know what follows from the fact that these things are. Which brings us to the fact that, as the culmination (at least so far) of the coup that began immediately upon the death of John Smith, Tony Blair’s tragically lost predecessor as Labour Leader, this country is now being run – really, literally run – by the wholly unelected and unaccountable Peter Mandelson of the Young Communist League and by his wholly unelected and unaccountable former boss, an utterly unrepentant old Maoist who went on to become a rabidly “free”-marketeering and pro-Bush Prime Minister of Portugal before being wafted into the Presidency of the European Commission.

Give me Prince Charles, and in due season King Charles III, over them any day.

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