14th February 2012

Valentine’s Day we’ll overlook. I’ve some more love thoughts brewing after Götterdämmerung (yes! umlauts), cast live from the Met on Saturday. Jeanette Winterbaum (we don’t like her) is rambling all over the Guardian today: ‘Let’s replace power with love.’ She really hasn’t the first idea. Any run-of-the-mill Poor Little Rich Gay could put her right: the two aren’t separable, for a start.  Power, and its attendant, money, are routinely despised, and Love loved. But in The Great Gatsby wealth, glamour, celebrity are not entirely corrupt but still contain some glimmer of ‘the last and greatest of all human dreams’ experienced fleetingly by the Dutch sailors on seeing for the first time ‘the fresh, green breast of the new world.’

Wagner has a thing or two to say: as we shall see.

But my theme today is monarchy. Her Majesty has made the huge mistake of inviting Robert Nevil to her Buckingham Palace for a reception in aid of Charles Dickens this evening. These book types… does she know how they behave? How they knock it back and back-chat?

I expect she does.

I’m moved by Jubilee thoughts to reaffirm the perfection of the Monarchy, or rather its absence of perfection which is somehow just right. Thank the Lord the heart of our Nation throbs in the bosom of a elderly lady whose only slender claim is inheritance and who, unborn to regnancy, would have been a modest, reclusive country woman, and still is that person in many dimensions while imposing Majesty in others. The utter fragility of the Monarchy is its glory: its dependence on the approval of the public, on the right person being born to King or Queenship, that it has not been sought.

Just imagine the horror were Sir Wilfred Self the President, or Deborah Orr or Jeanette Winterbaum. We’d end up with far more arse and shut-out than you get from Her Majesty. The drab theorists of equality never understand. The Queen, only there by chance, clinging on, an amateur really,  does far more to deflate the pomposity and self-importance of those seething just below her, the great and the good, the heads of this and that, than any Head-of-state-on-merit ever could.

The worldly, unearned splendour of the Monarchy works round to being  a kind of inclusiveness. Inequality is  a fact of life;  inheritance is an inevitable product of productive, wealth-generating societies. Bloody wealth-stripping revolutions have only produced  rigidity in the other direction.  Her Majesty in her person embraces the unfortunate rich, those stricken by inheritance , the necessary rich as well as everybody else.

Our Nation has changed, has had numerous silent revolutions in the last 150 years, without slaughter or disruption because of, not despite, the Monarchy.