Don’t get so worked up — it’s only a blog

I’m not sure how many members of the London Labour party I’ve met over the last 20 years or so. A thousand? Must be something like that. Sitting in local authority buildings which smell slightly of gas, the night outside cold and damp, ploughing through an interminable agenda of candidate selections; or down the pub after canvassing. Nice people, largely — you’d be surprised.

I’m not a member any more but a lot of my friends still are, so it’s a constituency I know very well. If you polled them on their views about the Royal Family, I suspect that somewhere between 1 and 2 per cent would declare themselves as monarchists. The rest would express an opinion anywhere on a spectrum leading from ‘they are a complete waste of time and money, an utter irrelevance, although I quite fancy Harry’ at one end to the more rigorous ‘they and their running-dog lickspittle lackeys should swing from the gibbets hewn by the honest labour of the working classes’. My own view always tended towards the former position, although I sometimes fell in the latter camp, usually just after the Duchess of York had been on TV talking about herself.

Pete White, a former parliamentary agent and prospective Labour council candidate in Essex, summed up what I believe would be the moderate, majority view of London Labour members when he said of the Queen, ‘She milks this country for everything she can’, and that Buck House should be open to the public. He also added that she was a ‘parasite’ and ‘vermin’ which moves him towards the leftish quartile of the chart, I suppose. He made these remarks on the blog of the Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell, which you may well consider to have been a tactical mistake, all things considered.