Chapter Three

The Monarchy, ‘Stick with Nurse...’

Not so very long before starting work on this book, I had a heated conversation with a woman of about my age, an educated lady with a lively intellect who had once run her own translation agency and had later become a qualified archaeologist. She mentioned a certain wedding and the possibility of public street parties to celebrate it. I said something rather scathing and uncharitable about the street parties. The lady demanded to know:

‘If people want to hold street parties, why do you want to prevent them?’

Immediately, I sensed that a whiff of anathematization was in the air and that I was in danger of tainting myself with the heresies of Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill (excellent company), Ralph Miliband (who allegedly left ‘an evil legacy’) and, recently - since the publication of her novel for adults The Casual Vacancy-J.K. Rowling (wonderful company - I only wished I deserved the association). Tolstoy was anathematized by the Russian Orthodox Church, in Britain individuals such as those just mentioned are anathematized by the holy offices of the Daily Mail. I hastened to make my position clear. In my opinion - I said - if these two young people wanted to demonstrate their commitment to each other by getting married, then that was a matter that should be of no interest to any sensible person other than their families and friends, after all, neither of them had yet achieved anything of any particular distinction.

The lady told me that the young husband-to-be was very good at the job he was currently doing. I could not help pointing out that a local postmistress I knew had a daughter who had served in Afghanistan as an RAF nurse; this young woman would probably get married within the next year or two, but no one would hold street parties to mark the occasion. As for preventing people holding street parties, I had no wish to do so, and I would not do so even if I had the power. However, as a fellow citizen, I was entitled to express my dismay that people might spend their time on such activities, just as I am dismayed that people spend their time reading The Sun and watching television soap operas. I am all for frequent parties; having lived in Spain, I had watched entire communities launch themselves into four-day fiestas at least three times a year, without - necessarily - celebrating anyone’s wedding and certainly not in adulation of well-known people.

My libertarian values seemed to reassure the lady, and the evening continued amicably. And yet there, in our conversation, lay one of the most important aspects of the subject of the monarchy. In Britain there lives a large family: a grandmother, a grandfather, sons and a daughter who once had ‘fairytale’ marriages that have not been outstandingly successful or happy, grandsons grown to adulthood. The family has enjoyed boundless wealth, privilege and educational opportunities. One daughter-in-law developed from a rather silly young woman into a serious and humane campaigner, offending the conventions of the family, frightening the elected and unelected British political elite and the international arms industry. She died in circumstances that some responsible and intelligent commentators and a great number of ‘ordinary people’ still find suspicious. Apart from this young woman, the family is not particularly interesting and shows less ability than the majority of large families. If they were a family of wealthy bankers or business people they would attract no notice at all, except perhaps as the objects of society gossip.

A great many of the arguments used to justify the monarchy are very similar in substance to an assertion I once heard my mother make. When I was a little boy I once asked my (then) very right-wing mother why we should stand when ‘God Save the Queen’ was played in the cinema. My mother said grandly and witheringly: ‘Because the Queen is your sovereign lady.’ There are a great many circular arguments of this kind; if you ask some people why they think Africans are inferior, they will say: ‘Because they are just Africans.’ And if you ask some believers how we know that the Bible is the revealed word of God, they will tell you: ‘Because it says so in the Bible.’ When you strip away grand phrases, many arguments in favour of the monarchy turn out to be circular in much the same way.

Interestingly enough, my mother - who was an intelligent woman, although not a very pleasant person - evolved into what would be called an angry left-winger in middle and old age; she also became a vitriolic anti-monarchist and ardent republican, and she had nothing to gain from this change - she had no career and no influence beyond her immediate family. She seemed deeply disappointed and infuriated by the political system she had once believed in. Even more interesting, perhaps, is the fact that the change began when Margaret Thatcher was elected to power in 1979. My mother idolized Churchill, had listened to Churchill’s speeches on the ‘wireless’ and survived the intensive Nazi bombing of Swansea, but the ideology of Mrs Thatcher seems to have been more than she could stomach. It often happens that a loss of faith in one manifestation of a political system brings disillusionment with the whole edifice.

Prince Charles, who is now, after the Queen, the most prominent member of the Royal Family, moved my mother to anger in particular. I also remember a Latin teacher from my childhood, a genuine right-wing ex-army officer and an official of the local Conservative Party. This teacher used to tell a funny story in one line: ‘There was once a cavalry officer who was so stupid that even his fellow cavalry officers noticed.’ I sometimes recall this story when I hear of Prince Charles, substituting ‘member of the Royal Family’ for ‘cavalry officer’ and ‘other members of his family’ for ‘fellow officers’. However, this is unjust. The Prince does not entirely deserve the scathing contempt of the frequently superb essayist Christopher Hitchens either (comparable in venom to comments by my mother).

Some of the pronouncements Charles has indulged in over the years have been blazingly silly, but his remarks on climate change deniers in a speech at an awards ceremony at Buckingham Palace at the end of January 2014 were admirably sensible. Here he supported the findings of science. Hitchens rightly attacked the Prince’s very, very silly remarks on Galileo in 2010. It might be a good idea if the heir to the throne read one of the excellent books by the Cambridge physicist and science editor Joanne Baker, one of the many fine popularizers of science that Britain has produced - perhaps he has subsequently done so.

As far back as 1982, Prince Charles stated: ‘The whole imposing edifice of modern medicine... is like the celebrated Tower of Pisa: slightly off-balance.’ This is largely true, especially if we include psychiatry, which is ignorant and callous pseudo-medicine. If Charles showed a naïve enthusiasm for homeopathy, then it must also be said that the drug companies exercise great influence over the actions and thinking of doctors. As the health service in Britain is denied the resources to provide widely accessible care on the level of the Soviet Union in the 1950s or tiny, besieged, revolutionary Cuba in the 1980s, the quick results offered by mainstream therapies are perpetually in favour. (Anyone who doubts this comparison should read a biography of Solzhenitsyn, who suffered from and was successfully cured of severe cancer in the 1950s, while he was a former political prisoner still under surveillance, or the essay on Cuba written by Germaine Greer for Women: A World Report published by the UN.)

And here is Prince Charles writing a Foreword to a collection of essays celebrating the 350th anniversary of The Book of Common Prayer in 2012: ‘Who was it who decided that for people who aren’t very good at reading, the best things to read are those written by people who aren’t very good at writing... banality is for nobody. It might be accessible for all, but so is a desert.’ This is well said and very true - it would presumably have been ignored by Hitchens who detested both the monarchy and religion, and bravely faced his own death in a spirit of unshakeable atheism the year before the Prince’s words were published. (Hitchens was the arch-enemy of the British Royal Family and his arguments are frequently conclusive when considered honestly; sadly, he dwells spitefully on the Prince’s physical appearance, which is great fun - unless you happen to be Charles and his family - but quite unworthy as political commentary.)

Nevertheless, even the best of the Prince’s criticisms are not above the level we would expect from a middling, reasonably clever newspaper columnist. This is the pinnacle of the intellectual achievement of the Royal Family as far as we can ascertain: we can only go on what is known publicly. The endlessly repeated claims that the Queen has ‘great knowledge’ and an ‘astute understanding’ of world affairs are based on necessarily private and undisclosed conversations. These claims are almost always made by politicians with a personal interest in voicing such judgements, and they are echoed by writers who support the monarchy. Also, the political leaders who have met the Queen and praise her in this way are usually unimpressive in their own mental processes as well as seriously deficient in the basic honesty of the average person.

It is worth adding that Prince Charles put on wellington boots and visited Somerset in February 2014, seeing for himself the areas devastated by the winter floods and criticizing the fact that it had taken so long for the government to provide effective help, a little reminiscent of the condemnation of poverty and unemployment in South Wales by Edward VIII. This can be dismissed as a public relations exercise by a man who would be King in the near future. However, at least the heir to the throne bothered to go. Cameron, a Prime Minister uncomfortably upstaged by Charles - and a man rapidly leaving behind his slender humane credentials in a pursuit of re-election squalid even by current political standards - lamely copied the visit three days later, right down to the wellington boots.

Contemporary Review was founded in 1866 and reached its third century of continuous publication. The journal specialized in international affairs, politics, the environment and current literary issues and was read in over sixty countries. I had the pleasure of seeing several of my essays published in the Review over the years, and I naturally read other contributions with the keenest interest. The June 2012 issue of Contemporary Review (Volume 294, number 1705) contained an article entitled ‘The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee’ by James Munson, the historical biographer and literary editor of CR. It is a tribute to the integrity of the journal that Munson’s article was published alongside an icily factual and restrained piece on the Palestinian struggle for survival by Hafizullah Emadi; a thoughtful, brilliantly written reappraisal of Harold Wilson by Geoffrey Heptonstall; a wonderfully challenging reflection on All Quiet on the Western Front and the introduction of children to violence in literature by Chris Arthur; and an essay of my own on Solzhenitsyn. Munson squarely supports the monarchy and his article is a defence of that institution and a tribute to the present Queen and her family. His essay, self-consciously learned and impatient of intellectual imprecision and muddle, can therefore be seen as a good example of serious monarchist thinking that is worth citing in any discussion of the monarchy. James Munson also defends and supports the Church of England and its ties with the monarchy.

Some books are reviewed in the course of Mr Munson’s essay, all of them written by individuals of royalist persuasion. Sarah Bradford calls the Queen a ‘living representative of sixty years of our history’. Perhaps it is worth pausing to consider that little word ‘our’, so beloved by those who defend the status quo, and worth recalling Aneurin Bevan’s book In Place of Fear, quoted in the last chapter, in which he describes the physical environment of Parliament as experienced by a newly elected Labour MP (bearing in mind that Parliament is opened constitutionally by the Queen reading ‘The Queen’s Speech’). Bevan recalls:

His first impression is that he is in church... Here he is, a tribune of the people, coming to make his voice heard in the seats of power. Instead, it seems he is expected to worship; and the most conservative of all religions - ancestor worship... It is not the past of his people that extends in colourful pageantry before his eyes. They were shut out from all this; were forbidden to take part in the dramatic scenes depicted in these frescoes... the House of Commons is an elaborate conspiracy to prevent the real clash of opinion which exists outside from finding an appropriate echo within its walls. It is a social shock absorber placed between privilege and the pressure of popular discontent.

Moving to the left - so to speak - we find a vivid and amusing account by Trotsky of his first meeting with Lenin, then staying in rooms in the Tottenham Court Road; Lenin took the young Trotsky for a walk around London:

From a bridge, Lenin pointed out Westminster and some other famous buildings. I don’t remember the exact words he used, but what he conveyed was: ‘This is their famous Westminster’ and ‘their’ referred, of course, not to the English but to the ruling classes. This implication, which was not in the least emphasized... was always present... [T]hey know this or they have that, they have made this or achieved that...[1]

How fresh great political writing is - how little it seems to date! Do miners who saw their communities destroyed in the 1980s or single mothers on one of the ‘sink’ or ‘dumping ground’ estates really feel that the Queen represents their history? And if these examples seem too class-bound, here is the scientist and philosopher Jacob Bronowski, who lived in Britain from childhood:

The men whom I have spent my life with have said little things on bits of paper, sometimes written in mathematics and sometimes written in poetry, which will shape the future of the human race far more profoundly than those silly, political decisions. Power is very evanescent but knowledge is a tremendously compressed charge which waits for the future...[2]

We can think of quite a number of eminent scientists alive today who almost certainly hold a similar view of the history of the last sixty years, although they may be too polite to say so. In fact, the word our, when used in politics and political commentary, can be unusually seductive and insidious. Sadly, discussion of this fact is usually conducted in the Daily Mail or in rather abrasive and simple-minded left-wing writing. People like Sarah Bradford and James Munson seem to find it difficult to recognize that ‘our’ in this context properly refers to individuals like themselves. Those who are passionately fond of the monarchy are rather like football enthusiasts and the members of certain churches: they see life in terms of the objects of their adulation. But their terms of reference are likely to produce an incredulous or uncomfortable yawn in the rest of us.

Perhaps, after all, defending and justifying the existence of the monarchy is rather like arguing that the Earth is flat and that hellfire really exists; Mr Munson’s intellectual contortions certainly suggest this, as when he quite rightly points out that British Prime Ministers have become increasingly American-style executive leaders, but goes on to add: ‘In part this is because democracies like “strong leaders” - the twentieth century’s greatest dictators were after all produced by democracies - and “strong government”.’ We cannot help wondering what kind of history Mr Munson has studied and feels that he has lived through and is currently living in - perhaps it is some kind of alternative history of which his Queen is the ‘living representative’.

Mao Zedong was ‘produced’ by the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and the declaration of a republic that could not impose its authority on the Chinese warlords, followed by prolonged civil war and Japanese invasion, and then further civil war in which the communists prevailed after massive loss of life. Stalin was produced by a country that had known nothing but autocracy, and by the isolation of the Bolshevik Revolution - intended by Lenin to be the first stage of a world revolution - in conditions of famine, economic collapse, civil war and the political disaster of Lenin’s own death. Hitler’s power sprang out of the humiliation of Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, worldwide recession, unemployment, the crucial backing of leading industrialists who saw him as their tool in crushing communism and the deep-seated anti-Semitism of central Europe. The democracy of the Weimar Republic had already largely crumbled when it gave in to Hitler through Hindenburg’s appointment of the Nazi leader as Chancellor; even then, the Reichstag Fire was needed as the pretext for Hitler’s abolition of the last vestiges of democracy. It was incipient civil war in Italy after February 1921, rioting in the major cities and the fear of communist revolution on the part of the King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, who appointed Mussolini Prime Minister, that ‘produced’ the first fascist dictator. And Mussolini never abolished the monarchy! The King of Italy presided over fascist excesses, including the murderous occupations of Ethiopia (Abyssinia) and Albania, becoming emperor and king of those unfortunate countries. As fear of dictatorship and the alleged role of the monarchy in forestalling it are major underpinnings of monarchist thinking, it is disturbing to find this eminent royalist writing about dictators with a blatant contempt for the facts that would make a Pravda journalist in the darkest days of Stalin blush.

In any consideration of the British monarchy we need to ask ourselves three questions. Is the influence of the present Queen and the heir to the throne a positive or negative one? Is the part played by the monarchy in British public life as an institution positive or negative? Is the concept of monarchy a valuable or a harmful one in the modern world? According to Mr Munson, the present Queen has ‘done a great deal to enhance and maintain this country’s standing in the world’. State visits and meetings with foreign leaders are given interminable attention and coverage.

Perhaps we could look at a different example. We recall that on the recommendation of the Colonial Secretary, Anthony Greenwood, in November 1965, Harold Wilson urged the Queen to approve an order in the Privy Council detaching the Chagos Islands from Mauritius in order to hand them over to the Americans. The Queen did just that. Parliament was not informed. Almost exactly thirty-five years later, on 3 November 2000, the High Court declared the deportation of the islanders unlawful. But in June 2004 the Queen approved another order in the Privy Council that overturned the High Court judgement, pronouncing on the fate of thousands of her victimized, sold and oppressed subjects with one word: ‘Agreed!’

Presumably, this is an example of the Queen’s ‘devotion to the Commonwealth’, as James Munson calls it. Of course, monarchists argue that this kind of thing is not the Queen’s fault because she can only act on the advice (instructions) of government ministers - an argument as easily deployed as the one that holds that she exercises an enormous influence for good in the country ‘through carefully worded questions, advice and, rarely, warnings based on her long experience and independent position’ (Munson again). No such questions, advice or warnings to help the Chagossians!

Further, James Munson proudly describes another example of the Queen’s ‘soft power’. A young man from Bristol wrote to the Queen asking for her opinion of the possibility of ‘a blasphemous film about Christ’ being made in Britain by a foreign director (the film is not specified). The Queen wrote to the young man to express her bitter opposition to the proposal, stating also that she had no objection to the publication of her letter. The film was not made. Naturally, it quite escapes the notice of religious people that nothing is ‘blasphemous’ in some absolute sense. Something can only be blasphemous if you are a member of a certain religious group, although non-believers may readily agree that some films, books or other works are tasteless and ugly.

In February 1989, people across the world were appalled when Ayatollah Khomeini condemned Salman Rushdie to death for his ‘blasphemous’ book The Satanic Verses. In a society that claims to take pluralistic democracy seriously there should be no such thing as a Church of England, still less the Church of Britain that is implied, but only the Anglican Church.

The Queen did not, of course, condemn anyone to death. However, we can imagine the uproar in the tabloid press and in serious papers and among serious people - and it would surely be justified - if a senior imam prevented an allegedly anti-Muslim film being made because he was ‘bitterly opposed’ to it. What if Arthur Scargill stopped the production of a film hostile to trade unions by his mere disapproval? Or can we imagine J.K. Rowling suppressing a film attacking single mothers through her publicly expressed resentment of its contents? Who can say, in any case, what the faithful may regard as blasphemous? Monty Python’s Life of Brian was confidently labelled a blasphemous attack on Jesus Christ by people who did not take the trouble to watch it - if they had, they would have known that it was not about Jesus Christ. Brian was - among other things - a satirical attack on left-wing splinter groups and pedantic trade union officials, something that should have pleased those who denounced the film.

Moving from the Prince of Peace to the Prince of the Arms Industry, we find the heir to the throne imparting this piece of wisdom, standing near a hideous ‘anti-personnel’ weapon at the Dubai arms fair: ‘The British are really rather good at making certain kinds of weapons. It’s the hoary old chestnut. If we don’t sell them, someone else will.’[3] The Prince seems at times to share the very shaky grasp of history from which his apologists suffer. A version of this argument is used to discourage many kinds of moral effort, including the banning of vivisection laboratories. Wilberforce, in his nineteen years of successful struggle to abolish the slave trade, was not deterred by the argument ‘if we don’t conduct this trade, someone else will’. It can also be argued - no doubt correctly - that the slave trade would have eventually disappeared as it became unprofitable, just as it can be said that Hitler’s Nazi empire would have eventually disintegrated. Unfortunately, eventually can sometimes be a rather long time. It requires individuals prepared to make a moral effort together with objective conditions to bring about the next step in human progress - sooner rather than later. Apparently, the Prince is not prepared to use his influence to oppose the sale of devices that cause the agonizing deaths of children, just as his mother has failed to use hers to oppose the ethnic cleansing imposed on some of her subjects.

Individuals aside, we should consider the function of the British monarchy, which we are told ‘reigns but does not rule’, as part of the machinery of the state. John Pilger describes the way in which the Privy Council was twice used to violate the human rights of the Chagossians:

[A] secretive, unaccountable group known as the Privy Council. The members of this body... include present and former government ministers. They appear before the Queen in Buckingham Palace, standing in a semi-circle around her, heads slightly bowed, like Druids... ‘orders-in-council’ - are read out by title only. There is no discussion; the Queen simply says ‘Agreed’. This is government by fiat: the use of a royal decree by politicians who want to get away with something undemocratically. Most British people have never heard of it... prime ministers use it [for] unpopular wars... Egypt in 1956 and Iraq in 2003.[4]

Ex-cabinet minister Tony Benn made the point that: ‘As colony after colony won its freedom... the British people found themselves virtually alone as subjects of the Crown.’ He also points out that as late as 1977 the Central Office of Information in its annual handbook Britain described this country as a ‘monarchical state’, not as a parliamentary democracy. Benn continues:

[D]e-colonisation [of the British people] might encounter opposition in a number of forms... the prerogatives of the Crown to dismiss and dissolve, and the loyalties of the courts and the services... might all be used to defend the status quo against the parliamentary majority elected to transform it... [T]hose forces opposed to democratic reforms could argue that they were operating in accordance with the letter of the constitution... Unlike countries where the overthrow of elected governments by a non-elected military elite... take[s] place... the British Constitution reserves all its ultimate safeguards for the non-elected elite. (Emphasis added)[5]

The powers of the Privy Council - and by extension those of the Crown - were skilfully used by Margaret Thatcher during the war in the Falkland Islands. Let us remember that cabinet ministers are sworn into Her Majesty’s Privy Council and sworn to secrecy by a personal oath made to the Clerk of the Council. Mrs Thatcher called for all-party talks on the crisis in the Falklands. Michael Foot, the Labour leader, refused. Such consultations would have been on ‘Privy Council terms’, which would have meant observing secrecy and thus curtailing the Opposition’s opportunities to criticize the government. The Constitution was handily available to reserve the conduct of the war entirely to the Prime Minister, with the ready-made pretext that she had offered participation to other parties, or to muzzle effective criticism of her actions.[6]

Ultimately, the British Constitution and the monarchy do not guarantee democracy and safeguard against dictatorship at all. In a time of extreme crisis an opponent of the British government might be prosecuted and imprisoned under anti-terrorist legislation, something that has become far more possible since 11 September 2001. Even if this British Solzhenitsyn, Nelson Mandela or Aung San Suu Kyi (if one existed) had his/her conviction overturned by the High Court - more likely the High Court would declare the prosecution of certain activities to have no foundation in law - the Privy Council could be used to set aside the High Court judgement. And if this seems impossible, remember that the Britain of 2014 seemed impossible in 1964 or 1974.

Yet James Munson and those who share his views go on proceeding by argument-by-scare-stories. ‘If the Queen did not open a new parliamentary session who would do so?’, Mr Munson asks. ‘Perhaps the duty could be vested in the Speakers or the Prime Minister of the day, invoking memories of the parliamentary dictatorship of the 1640s?’ But why not invoke associations with democratic countries - our neighbours in Western Europe - that have no monarchy? Thanks to the powers of the monarchy, albeit quiescent ones, Britain is in a permanent state of inherent or potential dictatorship.

Finally, monarchy is based on a silly concept. Thomas Paine regarded a hereditary head of state as an absurd notion, quite as much as the idea of a hereditary physician or a hereditary astronomer would be. The idea that an individual should have the right to exercise enormous power, or influence and ‘soft power’, simply because he or she is born into a certain family belongs to the Middle Ages.

The continued existence of the monarchy is no more needed to provide ‘legitimacy and historic continuity’ (Munson) for the process of government than the continued use of public execution is needed to give legitimacy to the legal system, or the burning of heretics is necessary to legitimize religious life, or the idea of an Earth-centred universe is required to give continuity to astronomy and physics. (In the early twenty-first century, after over a hundred years, the conviction of thinkers such as Tolstoy, who believed that nothing gives legitimacy to the process of government, is once again growing in force and appeal.) However, monarchists go on insisting that a republic has to mean a republic on the model of the United States or France where the head of state is also the head of government; yet in Ireland and Iceland this is not the case, and the office of President of Finland has been scaled down in recent years to that of head of state rather than executive leader.

It would be perfectly possible to have a republic in which an elected president is not only the head of state standing above party politics, but also a person nominated as a candidate because of distinction in a non-political field who must not be a former minister or Prime Minister. Abolishing the monarchy does not need to mean transforming the office of Prime Minister into that of an American-style president. James Munson, pulling another spectre out of the bag, tells us that: ‘Without Elizabeth II we would have President Blair or perhaps President Beckham [the footballer].’ Presumably, this could also be updated to include President Cameron. This is as much nonsense as the assertion that ‘the twentieth century’s greatest dictators were after all produced by democracies’.

Why should we not have President J.K. Rowling, President Stephen Hawking (whose severe illness did not prevent public appearances and interviews for a number of years) or President Carol Ann Duffy? After all, the Czechs elected a creative writer as president. Even the grotesque prospect of President Beckham is hardly more dreadful than the actuality of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The concept underlying monarchy is infantile and infantilizing, especially when combined with the modern media-driven obsession with the Royal Family, quite as pernicious as soap operas and endless gossip about film stars, models and footballers. The scaled down monarchies of Norway, Sweden and Denmark exist in societies with deeply ingrained egalitarian and libertarian values, and so they are compatible with a highly educated and sophisticated electorate. Sadly, the monarchy in Britain reinforces the prejudices of the British and their inflated, insular and partly illusory notions of the strength of democracy in their country, as well as their lack of vigilance in matters of political freedom and their weak sense of historical awareness.

No serious republican movement of any size has existed in modern times, and even a debate over the continued existence of the monarchy forms no part of political life. James Munson loathes Tony Blair and admires the Queen - and presumably also Prince Charles - extravagantly. The essayist Christopher Hitchens loathes Prince Charles but admires Blair for his pro-Americanism. It is important to realize, however, that both Blair and Prince Charles are inimical to democracy, not because they are ‘bad’ human beings, which is largely an irrelevant issue, but due to their function and the role they have played and still play in the world. The continuing British acceptance of and enthusiasm for the monarchy suggests a crude proverbial injunction given to Victorian and Edwardian children, later adapted by Hilaire Belloc in a comic poem: ‘Stick with Nurse, or you may find something worse.’

1 Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station, New York, 1972; London, 1991 (previously, 1940, 1960, 1968).

2 Jacob Bronowski, Journey Round a Twentieth Century Skull (The last broadcasts), BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 and the World Service; The Listener, 15 May–3 July 1975.

3 Interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, ‘Charles, the Private Man, the Public Role’, a Dimbleby Martin production for Central TV, broadcast 29 June 1994.

4 John Pilger, Freedom Next Time, London, 2006.

5 Tony Benn, Arguments for Democracy, London, 1981.

6 Stephen Blake and Andrew John, Iron Lady: The Thatcher Years, London, 2003, 2012, 2013.