The Dissident

Perhaps I should have responded to this story earlier. Instant reaction is, after all, the main (and only?) virtue in a blog. I held off, though, partly because of idleness but chiefly because I really didn't think it was actually a story. But the repercussions keep rumbling on and I feel I have to add my tuppenyworth.

It is, of course, Prince Charles. According to one of his former lackeys, the Prince's opinion of himself rather differs to ours. He believes he is raising important issues, from the value of talking to plants to China's human rights record. He brings a voice to debates which is generally excluded from political circles. He is, in short, a dissident.

Even the royalists I know reacted in the same way to this. Laughter, basically, often quite loud. Charles does bring publicity to certain issues and derision at exactly the same time; rather like Tom Cruise's championing of Scientology. It's hard to think of a single change he has made in all his years of wittering on. The 'brutalist' modern buildings only dropped out of fashion when architects got bored with concrete and turned to glass. Organic produce had to wait until the serious campaigners, who could explain the benefits properly, started to champion it before it appeared in the supermarkets. And I think we all concluded that China turning tanks on unarmed protestors was a bad idea. Charles is basically a more palatable version of his father, who used to travel the world and call his hosts a bunch of slit-eyed wops. We read about them, laugh at them and move on. There is a reason why voices like his are excluded. They are ludicrous and there is no logical reason why we should be heeding them at all. After all, Charles is a man whose job description starts and ends with 'hanging around waiting for my mum to die.'

But his beliefs in himself, if nothing else, have been taken seriously. Columnists in The Guardian have been worrying about them all week; Steven Hewlett, for example, called him "a quite serious... media manipulator." And no doubt The Mail et al have been full of articles cheering him on. I wouldn't care to read these on a full stomach but I hope that Charles listens to them. And that they inspire him to greater things when his mum does finally die.

Because I have a dream of a republican Britain, probably the only way we'll get one in the near future, and it is this: A pushy new monarch on the throne clashes with the Prime Minister. Said monarch decides to actually exercise some of his theoretical powers, particularly the one allowing him to dissolve Parliament. The result, a very short constitutional crisis ending with Parliament asking for the keys to Buckingham Palace and 1,000 years of back taxes. Yes, you keep standing up for yourself, Charles, and don't let the example of one of your namesakes hold you back.