They wouldn't have thought much of this wedding back in 1953



Friday's Royal parade was a dying gasp for the Monarchy, not a new beginning. This isn’t wishful thinking. I want the Crown to survive. But I do not think it can do so in a modern Britain that has turned its back on the ideas and habits that make a Monarchy possible.



Almost everything about the day was false, and wherever it touched reality it was worrying rather than reassuring.

The Royal cars trailed to Westminster Abbey between motorcycle outriders with flashing blue lights and Range Rovers crammed with bodyguards.



If you go back to the 1953 Coronation you will find it was a profoundly British occasion - a celebration reaching back far into the past, of our long and happy sovereignty over ourselves

On the way back, the Life Guards (trained killers to a man) for some reason had to be escorted down the road by mounted police. Even Majesty must now be governed and pestered by the twin menaces of ‘security’ and ‘health and safety’.

The police, for once looking like servants of the people in their tunics and helmets, only reminded us how many of them there are and how rarely we see them, and also that on all other days of the year they slouch about in flat caps and stab vests.

The Edwardian braid and sashes worn by Princes and Dukes emphasised that our Armed Forces are shrunken remnants – lots of big hats, not many planes, ships or soldiers. Never have they looked so laughably Ruritanian.

Inside the Abbey, it was obvious that most of those present, though they are our educated elite, feel awkward in church and do not know the words of what were once familiar hymns. And even on the 400th anniversary of the majestic, poetic and powerful King James Bible, we had to endure a lesson (sorry, a reading) from some flabby modern version.



The marriage service was, as it almost always is, tamed to remove the really dangerous, subversive bits. What? A wife obey her husband? He’ll be calling her ‘dear’ next.



On the way back from the abbey the Life Guards (trained killers to a man) for some reason had to be escorted down the road by mounted police

But then again, this husband didn’t promise to endow his wife with all his worldly goods, only to share them, nor to worship her with his body. The blunt statement that the first purpose of marriage is the procreation of children was censored, too.

The fierce condemnation of men who behave towards women ‘like brute beasts that have no understanding’ was also left out. I should have thought it was needed now more than ever, given the way so many much-admired celebrities regularly act.

If you go back to the present Queen’s Coronation service in 1953, you will find it was a profoundly British occasion – a -celebration, reaching back far into the past, of our long and happy sovereignty over ourselves.

It was also a straightforwardly Protestant Christian ceremony, based on ideas of self-discipline and self-restraint that we have entirely abandoned in the years since. The two things are completely bound together. You cannot remain free unless you can ¬govern yourself.

When the day comes for our next Monarch to be crowned, we will no doubt put on an excellent show for the tourists. But political correctness, equality, diversity and the overwhelming fear of giving offence – and the fact that these days we prefer to do what we like rather than what we know to be good – will ensure that it will lack the heart and meaning it had in 1953. And my guess is that it will be the last time we try.





Will Ed steal the Right vote?





This Liberal Conservative Government is so Left-wing that even Labour is now attacking it from a conservative point of view

This Liberal Conservative Government is so Left-wing that even Labour is now attacking it from a conservative point of view.

Jack Straw, a former Home Secretary, has cunningly sniped at Kenneth Clarke’s plans to reduce the use of prison, producing these interesting figures: ‘The number of offenders given short sentences does not reflect a failure of the prison system, but the failure of those same offenders to respond to non-custodial sentences by going straight:

96 per cent of short-term prisoners have at least one previous conviction; three-quarters have seven or more, typically for multiple offences each time.’

Having dumped the Blairites by rejecting David Miliband, Labour is now free to get tough on crime and mass immigration. If it does so, then I think it can pretty much guarantee to win the next Election against the current lot, on any system of voting.

When the Tories abandon their own supporters as thoroughly as they are now doing, all kinds of things become possible.

Labour might even rediscover its old loathing for the European Union, another issue on which Mr Cameron has failed to live up to his own words.

Logically, Labour ought also to be in favour of restoring grammar schools, since they help the poor.

But do they have the courage and honesty to admit that most of their policies for the past 50 years have been wrong?

I’m still waiting for any proof that the volcanic ash cloud, which paralysed Europe a year ago, actually existed outside computer projections.

I have looked at AV carefully and can’t get excited about it, for itself. But I urge you to vote ‘No’ because the whole thing is designed to destabilise our existing system. Once you have got rid of what people were used to, and was always there, you can do what you like. There’s a long-term plan to make us as much as possible like a continental country, with politicians you can’t sack, endless coalitions, and politics entirely beyond the reach of the people.

I wish I thought that Anthony Blair had been deliberately left off the Royal Wedding invitation list. It would show that the Palace still had some fighting spirit in it somewhere, if they had set out to snub this annoying, destructive, oily person. But alas, I suspect it was just a blunder by a flunkey.

The terrible death of 15-year-old Isobel Reilly, apparently from an overdose of ‘Ecstasy’, reminds us how dangerous drugs can be – though the risk to mental health from supposedly ‘soft’ cannabis is the gravest threat to the young. But I was struck by the response of one London commentator,

Katie Law. She said in the London Evening Standard: ‘I never cease to be amazed at how many middle- class parents I know regularly snort drugs, smoke weed, pop pills and drink excessively, while at the same time lecturing their children on the dangers of substance abuse . . . One father jokingly told me this weekend he was sure his son wouldn’t dream of touching his weed, while at a dinner a couple of years ago, the man on my right rolled a joint while the one on my left began cutting lines of coke. There were three children asleep upstairs.’

This isn’t my world. I fled the capital many years ago. But it is the world in which many politicians, lawyers, media figures, actors and academics live and move. It is these corrupted, selfish people, for whom drugs are normal, who stand in the way of responsible laws to control them.