Anthony Wedgwood-Benn

The Queen in pre-Revolutionary times...

Helen Mirren's acting talents are mind-boggling...

One of this blogger of yours more striking memories of his half-decade spent in London was, beyond reasonable doubt, a lecture by a lionized Tony Benn. A Labour Party conference fringe meeting or a Quakers-organized lunch, can’t remember. But I do remember the title: “A Case for a British Republic”. Anthony Wedgwood-Benn was the Prince Kropotkin of the British ruling class. Very much a member of the higher echelons of the gentry by birth and schooling, he went on to consistently attack the Crown as an un-democratic stain at the heart of the British political system. On that lecture he warned that the British masses in a revolutionary moment - when the deference wall would have collapsed - would act as sans-culottes, metaphorically parading the heads of the Lords in their spikes.

It didn't turn out that way in the end. The escalating and retaliatory violence of class-war has been kept at bay (and does not infect the British political arrangement) by the tremendous brilliance of a few politicians who understood the risks.. Mrs Thatcher with her “popular capitalism” agenda delayed the Jacobin irruption and Mr Blair, with “New Labour” reforms in fox-hunting and the House of Lords, completed the job.

Why boring the Right Honourable Reader with all this stuff? Well. Let’s call it background reading for an entertaining masterpiece in the political film category. Go and see Stephen Frear's “The Queen” with a Ms. Helen Mirren more real as Lillybeth than that, you die. The “Courtiers” (from Buckingham, St. James’s L.C.O. or Balmoral) and the Sovereign Herself had to be rescued from pre-Bastille troubles by a political leader who showed a remarkable sang-froid. Blair was for a few days the successful Lafayette that Marie Antoinette, helas, never got.

Okay, the Monarchy was never at risk of sudden overthrow but one still has the words of Tony Benn echoing in one’s ears...