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.

BBC Radio played a journalist’s tape recording of an interview with the Prince of Wales this morning in which he is heard getting very angry over genetically-modified crops (GM).

Jeff Randall of the Telegraph, and formerly the BBC’s Business Editor, interviewed the Prince at the Castle of Mey in Caithness where Charles and Camilla are holidaying.

At one stage Randall asked him why he objects to “large corporations” making the running on GM, since only they can afford the investment for research and development.

Charles replied that large companies are conducting a “gigantic experiment with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong. Why else are we facing all these challenges, climate change and everything? That would be the absolute destruction of everything, and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future.”

The Prince believes food security should be put above an unregulated race for food production.

He continued with considerable passion, “And if they think it’s somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest environmental disaster of all time.”

The phrase “Count me out!” is used at least twice to hammer home his point. Commentators are today speculating precisely what he meant by it.

My personal interpretation is that he means to go on as he has for 40 years, making his case strongly and, as he sees it, non-politically. However, currently he is boycotting the Olympic Games because of China’s activities in Tibet. He also refused to attend a State banquet for the Chinese President in London and met the Dalai Lama openly, flaunting political advice.

Clearly Charles is treading a fine line on these issues now that food and climate change have become hot political topics around the world.

His position could become serious once he is King. Going against the Government of the day on policy would create not just an unseemly row but a major constitutional crisis. Already the usual crew of grumbly Labour backbenchers are feigning outrage at his remarks.

With the phrase “Count me out!” could Charles be signalling that he will not preside over a country that has relinquished its control in these crucial areas to the European Union, which has significantly softened its attitudes to GM crops and research in recent years?

Might he be saying, I just can’t do this job, it would be against all my principles and life’s work?

Or was it just a rush of blood to the head in response to some shoot-from-the-hip questioning?

Jeff Randall’s background to the interview can be read here.

What do we make of this?

Jonathan Cainer, the man who writes the horoscopes in the paper edition of the Daily Mail (the online version uses someone else), is often described as “spookily accurate”.

He regularly writes forecasts of world events which, amazingly, turn out right. For example, after 9/11, Madrid and 7/7 he made the risky forecast that there would be no more terrorist attacks on the West. Three years later, there have been no successful attacks.

His general forecast for 2008 is very upbeat, despite all the economic gloom around. However, today he paints a different picture for the Royal Family :

Earlier in January, I said this year would be exceptionally important for the Royal Family. I didn’t say much more because there is an ethical constraint attached to this topic. An astrologer must never predict the date of someone’s death. Generally, Princes and Princesses ascend to the throne only when their predecessors pass away. I can’t, therefore, say when Charles will become King without revealing when Elizabeth will die. Actually, I am not sure that a succession is the big story in 2008. It may be some other issue or event. But whatever it is, it will be big.

Do you believe in astrologers? If so, what might this huge event turn out to be?

The newly-published political memoirs of Alastair Campbell, former spin doctor to Tony Blair, throws a little light in dark corners here and there.

The Queen at Prince William’s Passing Out, Sandhurst

He claims that Princess Diana wanted her son William to inherit the Throne directly from the Queen and bypass Prince Charles. Now this is not new, as Diana implied as much in her explosive Panorama interview following the publication of Andrew Morton’s book in which she secretly collaborated.

On January 21, 1997, three months before Blair became Prime Minister, Campbell says that Diana dined with the Blairs and the Campbells at a friend’s home in East London. He claims, “while she was looking for things in the kitchen, I asked about William, and she said she would have some influence over what happened to him and she was clearly determined he would be King.”

It’s all a bit vague the way it’s written, but it rings true nevertheless.

What’s interesting is the phrase, “she said she would have some influence over what happened …” Seeing that the succession is determined by Act of Parliament and not by a divorced Princess of Wales, it’s hard to take it seriously at first glance.

Could this be the reason that she so assiduously collected all that material about Charles, even interviewing and taping his staff? Tapes which have since gone missing.

Diana, the toppler of Kings is a new string to her bow — if it’s all true, of course.