The case for the defence

A few years back, Harper’s & Queen magazine asked me to write an article in a series entitled ‘Something I have never done before’. (No, it was not: Write a short book review.) The piece that appeared in the month before mine was Norman Lamont on falconry — a hard pterodact to follow. I decided I would stand on a soapbox at Speakers’ Corner in London (well, actually it was a plastic milk-crate pinched from my milkman) and hold forth.

I thought religion and royalty were two subjects that would get the crowd going, and launched into religion first. People began to cluster round me. I had not been speaking for more than two minutes when a little man shouted out, ‘Do you believe in the Ten Commandments?’ I answered carefully, ‘I think they are quite a good prescription for how to live your life.’ Now the man shouted, ‘Do you believe “Thou shalt not steal?” ’ I felt on safe ground here. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Then wot you doing standing on that milk-crate?’ he demanded, and the crowd fell about. Others of the hecklers were equally adroit.

Having exhausted what I wanted to say about religion, I turned to royalty. I advanced the arguments in favour of our royal family: that they are a great tourist attraction; that the Queen, as they say, ‘has never put a foot wrong’; above all, that they are ‘living history’, descended directly from Victoria and less directly from centuries of other monarchs. I knew the weaknesses of my argument, though I felt they were outweighed by its strengths. One was the indecent wealth in royal hands — all those palaces and castles. I remembered something Lord St John once said on television: ‘I can see the point of a magnificent monarchy; I can see no point in a penny-pinching one.’