A bit of frivolity: Julie Burchill on her disdain for King Choss.
Charles has quietened down now, but as Heir Apparent, he really was a gob on a stick, with his constant speechifying about the wonders of everything from homeopathy to Islam and the notorious ‘black spider memos’ he bombarded politicians with. From badger culls (in favour) to supermarkets (against), there was nothing this none-too-bright man did not consider himself an expert on – how unlike the hands-off impartiality of our own late queen. Labour MP Paul Flynn called him ‘the lobbyist supreme in the land’, forever ‘putting forward a whole variety of views – including many bad science views and others that should have no more weight than the man down the pub’.
Many many bad science views. I’ve pointed out some of them over the years. He thinks he’s much cleverer than he actually is.
Despite his image of himself as a firebrand intellectual, his love of luxury was remarked on even by other members of a family not known for humble living. He had at one point four valets. The queen reportedly believed that ‘the amount of kit and servants he takes around is grotesque’. In 2002, his 85-strong court prompted several MPs to ask how he could justify such a large number of people waiting on him.
Since he became king, his ego has been mollified somewhat. He doubtless appears ‘nicer’ than the man who would sneer ‘Diana the Martyr’ at his young wife when she visited hospital patients. But that’s because he finally got to where he wanted – the top of the Ruritanian heap, with all the subjects who used to bow and scrape to his mother now giving fealty to him. Beneath it, he’s still the same ignorant big-head who wrote of Israel in a 1986 letter to Laurens van der Post after a tour of his beloved Gulf, that while there is ‘Much admire [in] some aspects of Islam… the influx of foreign Jews, especially from Poland, has helped to cause great problems… Surely some US president has to have the courage to stand up and take on the Jewish lobby?’
He’s not a million miles from Trumpishness, is he.
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