This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

Why does everyone assume that the royal baby born last week will one day become King? It seems most unlikely to me that the British Monarchy will last that long.

I am a keen monarchist myself and am sorry that an institution I love and revere is dying. But there is no point in pretending things are better than they are.

What actually holds it up? All the major parties long ago drove the hereditary nobles from the House of Lords. They implicitly accepted that inheritance didn’t entitle anyone to any office. It is only a matter of time before that logic takes its final step.

Nobody but me stands up for inheritance – though there’d be no private property or liberty without it – or challenges the idea that the rigged, corrupt and closed system we humorously call ‘democracy’ is the best possible way to choose our rulers.

Hardly anyone believes in the Christian God any more – though a growing number believe in Allah – so that means they also cannot believe the Monarch is divinely chosen.

We all know that the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are crammed with republicans who are waiting for the chance to get rid of the Crown. They circle round the royal finances in the hope of working up a public demand to impoverish and humiliate the Monarch.

The Tories, who pretend to be monarchists, would cheerfully guillotine the Queen or Prince Charles if they thought it would help them stay in office. They prove each week that there is nothing they won’t swallow, with this aim in mind.

As for the Commonwealth, it is mostly made up of republics, and its remaining monarchies feel – understandably, if wrongly – that they cannot really be grown-up nations until they have their own heads of state.

All this will become much more urgent when a new reign begins. Having narrowly escaped the fury of the Diana-worshipping mob in 1997, our present Queen has won an exalted status as the nation’s favourite grandma. Yet even she has to humiliate herself from time to time to seek the favour of the masses, as she did in the Olympics opening ceremony.

But this popularity is personal to her and will not pass to her successors. It flows from the fickle emotions of the mob. The same mob is quite capable of turning on a future King. I suspect it will do so. The generations who were brought up to revere the Royal Family, in the dear domestic days of George V and his stamp collection, or of George VI’s tours of the Blitzed ruins of London, are fast departing from among us.

Nowadays royal personages employ spin doctors and hope to win public affection by following fashion and courting popularity. They cannot be blamed for doing so – if they did not they would probably have been forced from the throne before now.

But those who ride that tiger always end up inside it in the end.

Another scandal the BBC won't talk about



One of the many bad things about the BBC is the way it can prevent a scandal from catching fire, by refusing to pay attention to it.

It is using this undeserved power now. A major development of national importance is unknown to millions, mainly because the Corporation’s vast publicly-funded news network will not give prominent coverage to it.

The disgrace involves another state-funded, unaccountable body, the grandly titled Serious Organised Crime Agency. This body was once dubbed Britain’s FBI but is more accurately described as Britain’s KGB. It clearly feels it has a greater duty to the powerful than to the public.

For it refuses to disclose the names of 102 clients – including celebrities, major corporations, banks and law firms – who used private detectives to hack phones and steal personal information. These people did much worse things than voicemail hacking. There was also police corruption, computer hacking and perverting the course of justice.

The scandal is at least as big as the phone-hacking accusations which have led to a full-scale inquiry into the press, and also to a vast police investigation, complete with dawn raids, arrests and high-profile prosecutions. It is probably bigger. Yet SOCA claims it would damage the human rights of those involved if it published their names, and might also damage the ‘financial viability’ of the companies involved.

These are extraordinary and inadequate excuses. They would never normally allow anyone to escape investigation for serious alleged wrongdoing. SOCA was not set up to practise selective justice. It should act.

The BBC’s disgraceful behaviour fuels suspicions it is happy to see the press restricted, while remaining beyond anyone’s control itself. To disprove these suspicions, it should give proper airtime to one of the biggest stories of modern times.

A slice of what makes us British ...coming to a cinema near you



Like most people, I don’t live in any of our major cities, and cannot easily go to see national theatre productions. So I am thrilled by a great new technical advance, which beams great plays, operas and ballet performances into cinemas all over the country.

Last week I was able to see Kenneth Branagh’s powerful and moving version of Macbeth, right, in this way. It may even have been better than going to the actual theatre, thanks to superb sound and plenty of close-ups.

I do hope there is a lot more of this, and that schools take advantage of it. Seeing Shakespeare’s great words actually spoken as they should be is part of being British, for that is how they lodge in the mind forever.

If more of us knew these plays, along with the Bible and the Prayer Book, we would be better people and a stronger, happier country.

An endless appetite for creating misery

For those who still thirst to intervene in Muslim countries, may I just mention that Iraq is now once again a war zone – though you hear little about it because it is now far too dangerous for Western media to visit most of that country.

More than 3,000 Iraqis have been killed in the past four months. And you can believe what you like – because there’s no independent verification – about a major battle which took place outside Abu Ghraib prison on Sunday. But Sunni rebels claim that hundreds of prisoners were released.

Suicide bombings are a regular event. And the vaunted ‘democratic’ government in Baghdad has almost collapsed. You’d think those who brought this about would be embarrassed. But they want to do it again in Syria and Iran.

How we despise our forebears for bowing and scraping to the aristocracy. But we do the same to rock stars.

Leeds City Council has apologised to Bruce Springsteen for ticketing his tour trucks when they were left on double yellow lines. The tickets were ‘legitimately issued’. But thanks to ‘special circumstances’ they were cancelled.

As far as I can see, the special circumstances were Mr Springsteen’s celebrity, and his celebrity. Oh, and his fame.

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