The Queen has acted promptly to head off a constitutional crisis following Gordon Brown’s inept attempt to win over a few Catholic votes in Scotland by threatening to butcher the 1701 Act of Settlement.

The Act of Settlement 1701

Buckingham Palace has indicated that the Queen will not even consider consenting to any carve up of the constitution until all Dominion Parliaments have agreed to it. That could take years, by which time Brown will just be an unpleasant memory in recent history.

Brown’s party politicking with the Monarchy reveals the depths of this man’s chicanery. Set to be comprehensively bundled out of office by the electorate, any device is now fair game to him. He is a dangerous, out-of-control head of government who could do even more damage to the country before he is sacked by the people.

Some months ago I called for him to be impeached. Today, Simon Heffer in the Telegraph makes the same demand.

The Queen can no longer cry, “Off with his head!”, but a constutional equivalent is available to her. Such is the state of the country’s finances, with even the Governor of the Bank of England making the short journey to the Palace to confer with her last week, it should not be difficult for Brown to be sacked, or for Parliament to be dissolved pending a swift General Election.

A republican constitution is the last thing the public wishes for. As historian Andrew Roberts puts it: “… the Act of Settlement is not the bigoted, irrelevant and obsolete law that Downing Street presents it as – it is one of the key pieces of legislation that has defined what Britain was and still is. … Britain is a Protestant country today largely because of the Act of Settlement. It secured the Hanoverian succession 13 years after the Glorious Revolution replaced the Catholic King James II with the Protestant William III (of Orange) and Mary II.” — Link to article.

Any politician who thinks that the Constitution can be made a political football should be dismissed from his post, no matter how lofty it is.

English Heritage has just run a competition to find England’s most useless Monarch. The result was never going to be a surprise because the “winner” could only come from a handful of stinkers and duffers.

In the end they alighted on that bulbous, wasteful drunk George IV, who was so corpulent he was known as the Prince of Whales before he became King.

George was totally self-obsessed, unlike his sweet-natured father George III, who had the misfortune to suffer from the genetic disease porphyria, which made him increasingly insane.

The younger George was also nasty and brutish to his rather ugly and unhygienic wife Caroline, and scandalized the nation by gross over-spending in very hard times. The baroque dazzle of the Brighton Pavilion in no way compensates for his extravagance, indeed it neatly sums it up. The Monarchy has rarely been as unpopular than it was under King George IV.

However, my own choice is the same as historian Andrew Roberts’s — King Stephen. Here’s his assessment of this odious man:

“King Stephen usurped his uncle Henry I’s throne in 1135, outmanouevring both his own elder brother Theobald and the rightful heir, Henry’s daughter the Empress Matilda. He seized the Treasury, crowned himself, gave Cumbria to the Scots to buy them off, paid Danegeld to appease the Danes and then plunged Britain into a series of four civil wars between 1138 and 1154. These left the country ravaged, impoverished and weaker than at any other time before or since.”

Anyone who has watched the British TV series, Cadfael, or read the books by Ellis Peters which are set in these civil wars, will have some idea of the privations of the period.

Andrew Roberts is right too when he says Britain is passing through a golden age during the reign of Elizabeth II. Let us hope she will soon be served by better politicians than now and for the rest of her time among us.