Fishy

Oh dear, oh dear. One shouldn’t. One really shouldn’t. It’s most unkind. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. One feels frightful about it, one feels almost tempted to leave it alone, to do the decent thing. And yet when one sees a barrel with a lot of lazy fish swimming around in it, one shoots at them. One can’t help it. And anyway, what’s the matter with fish today, why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their capabilities? Horrible jumped-up little bastards – where’s one’s gun?

No seriously the hell with all that. The hell with pacifism towards that particular easy fish. I mean – if Charles Windsor, of all the people in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, really thinks he is in a position to rag on other people for wanting to do jobs without qualifications or natural abilities – well I mean to say. I mean to say he is literally the one person in the entire country with the least right to say such a thing. Bar none. His saying it is the exact equivalent of George W Bush and his handlers having the almighty gall to call other people ‘elitist’ when he would be doing well to be a part-time security guard if he had not been born into the shrubbery.

Oh dear, oh dear. It is funny though. Funnier than Bush, because of course Charles is so powerless, despite all the ridiculous sucking up and deference and bowing and Sirring and the bales and bales and bales of money. And it’s so funny that he apparently thinks he himself has natural abilities, at least compared with all these horrible striving proles he’s surrounded with, not to mention all these terrifying PC black women lusting after promotions. It’s always been funny. It was funny that he thought he was so clever compared to Diana because he read (wait for it) boooooks by Laurens van der Post. Oh very deep. Mind you Diana was funny that way too. Katharine Graham once told her she might enjoy going to university and Diana was very amused, saying she’d had plenty of education from life. Uh…right. Perhaps all toffs are like that. It’s a toff thing, apparently, to scorn education. One doesn’t need that sort of thing, thank you very much, that’s for the lower orders who have to do something, aristocrats have only to Be.

There are a lot of good letters on the subject here. And there is an interesting side point in this article

Mr Clarke’s comments were seized upon by opponents as evidence of a breach of the convention whereby ministers do not criticise the Royal Family.

Well…excuse me, I’m just a Yank and a Republican and I don’t properly understand these things, but that does seem like a stupid convention. Why should the Royal Family be immune from criticism by ministers? I realize it has something to do with separation of government and crown, with keeping the muck of politics out of the more transcendent realm of the monarchy, and that that’s supposed to be good for continuity and the monarchy’s ceremonial role and all that. But still. It just does seem a ridiculous way to go about it. Choose this one person and treat it as if it’s magic, and then make the resulting oddity your head of state.

Since it’s such an odd system, I do wish we could stop trying to mimic it in the US.

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