Don’t get me wrong. I think we can all feel a little sorry for Gordon Brown these days – at least until we look at our pensions, or our children’s futures. The BBC were really doing us all a kindness when they kept his poor rictus grin off the screens as Nigel Farage and Dan Hannan tore into him the other day. It was painful to see him.
But when Gordon’s advisers study the polls and attempt to get some more positive media coverage for him, there’s no need for the republicans in the BBC (i.e. 97% of the staff) to go quite so far overboard. Is the fact that the Great Leader is attempting to browbeat HRH over the tragic Royal discrimination against Catholics really worthy of the main headline on all BBC channels and the website this morning ?
It’s certainly not a subject that exercises Catholics, and I don’t think that’s what the recent trouble in Northern Ireland’s about either. The only people who are really bothered by it are the usual left wing suspects (who generally can’t stand Catholics unless they’re armed, anti-British and homicidal) and Lib Dem MP Evan Harris.
Why the BBC is acting as a megaphone for Gordon’s “diversionary exercise” I simply can’t understand – any more than I can understand why Robert Peston does the same for him on the economics front.
(of course the problem with the Act of Successsion is that Britain is (formally) not a secular democracy, but an explicitly religious state, with the head of state also head of the state church. Once discrimination against Catholics is removed, the basis of the UK constitution must also change. And why stop at Catholics ? Discrimination is discrimination, surely ? Shouldn’t Prince William be able to marry someone like Chah Oh-Niyol Kai Whitewind ?)