The Crown is Fiction

Way back in the 19th century when it was just fine to shoot and bayonet anyone in a hot country not wearing a red jacket and pith helmet, Walter Bagehot wrote some stuff down about the English Constitution, perhaps peeved that the Americans and the French had already done so years before. We had not bothered to put pen to paper because the English class system made it unnecessary for the lower orders to think about such things. They were busy dying in their droves in the Mills, Mines and Factories of the smoke filled blackened North. Either that or they were dying of tropical diseases in places they couldn’t spell while singing ‘All things bright and beautiful’ as their innards dissolved into a putrefying morass of over excited gut bacteria. The Aristocracy just assumed they had the right to rule while stuffing foxes full of gin and lead and pouring pheasant blood onto their babies heads. They had no need therefore of a written book of instructions on who and how to rule a country.

But. The new rich, the expanding bourgeois merchant class and factory owners, thought they needed something to support their own claim to be a ruling class. Cutting off the heads of the nobility was a bit too ‘French’ and in any case would get in the way of making money through stealing diamonds, selling opium and telling huge woppers on the stock market about how much money they could make from building railways.

Walter duly provided. On Monarchy he wrote:

“Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it…Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic”.

Let daylight in upon the ‘magic’. Yes, let that sink in.

Daylight has not only been let in, the curtains have been removed and burned, all of the lights in the house turned on, spotlights hired and trained on the front door and the bare shiny arse of monarchy stands on the threshold mooning at passers by. Not only can we see that there is a hairy wart on the left buttock, we have also been shown a fleeting glimpse of a part of the body that even one’s mother has not seen since we were in nappies.

Mexit, or whatever it is called, has shown the magic to be, well rather tawdry. ‘The Family’ is just another family. Philip does not shit rainbows, the Queen is yer granny working very hard at keeping up appearances, Charles has forgotten where the phone is, Wills is muttering “fuck, fuck, fuck, please let me be king” while Andrew lurks in a dark corner thanking his lucky stars that his nephew’s choice of wife has rather overshadowed his misdemeanours with the barely pubescent (allegedly). Ann is in the shed kicking a corgi to death. Edward does not exist.

Speculating on which tinge of the ethnic rainbow a future royal sproglet will be, seems to me to be but a minor infringement given Monarchy’s role in such far away places such as the Americas, the Caribbean and India. “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack” was amply demonstrated in the Amritsar massacre, the Mau Mau uprising and the Herculean efforts at starving the Indians through not lifting a blood soaked finger in famine relief. Lets face it, the Monarchy has not got a great track record in fostering Equality and Diversity throughout history, with a few exceptions. Having a white skin did not stop the Irish being royally shafted as the last potato they had was sent to Croydon, and neither did being of white Dutch descent prevent the Boers being herded into concentration camps. An Equal Opportunities massacre.

Contemporary shenanigans have followed more recent uproar over a TV programme. It is as if the professional stokers of hate in the British press have nothing better to do than sell papers using the tried and tested methods of, er…stoking hate. They went a bit nuts over depictions of the Windors on the telly.

The Crown – the monarchical orgy fest produced by Netflix – is a work of fiction! What!? Are they actually telling me that a story about Monarchy, which is a fictional concept based on a fictional divine right justifying itself through myth and legend with as much truth value as Noah’s Ark, is a made up farrago of lies? Walter Bagehot already knew it was a magic trick, designed to fool the public into not asking questions about how they got their wealth and privileges in the first place (hint: it has something to do with sex, money and murder).

Are they really suggesting on Netflix that Prince Charles is not a waxwork effigy of emotion crying for a Camilla shaped comfort blanket, Philip is not an imperial throwback with a penchant for shooting ‘slope eyed, fuzzy wuzzies’ or anything furry scuttling around the woodlands like a ketamine fuelled wood louse? Princess Ann is actually the glamour puss ooozing sexuality out of every fetlock while Margaret sits morosely chewing cigars and draining hope out of a gin bottle? The Queen herself does not actually exist. What we see is a facsimile of a person, and an abstract in hats as a metaphor for duty and a commonwealth so devoid of importance it ranks alongside the applications of leeches as a cure for syphilis. 

What next? They’ll be telling me others things are not true! 

What, Humpty Dumpty wasn’t an egg? Noddy was actually a permanently drunk closet racist who hated bearded men with over large auricles? Grizzlies prefer bidets?

I think we must be told (but not at speed in a Paris underpass*). 

*too soon….or did that not happen as well?