Friday 11 March 2016

If the Queen wants to leave the EU does that settle the question?

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Does H.M. the Queen want to leave the EU? If she does, does that settle the question of how to vote or would that be being too loyal to the throne?


According to a story in the Sun headlined "Queen backs Brexit" she does and the editor of the Sun, Tony Gallagher, said on Radio 4 
"We knew much more than we published".
But in fact the Sun's story, true or not, dates from 2011 and 'Brexit', Britain leaving the EU, was not mentioned.  So, however much the Sun protests, things are not clear.

I was told last year that the Duke of Edinburgh is strongly for Brexit but the
Queen has believed all her Prime Ministers' advice going back to Supermac. If, despite this, she wants us to leave the EU her reasons must be very good ones. The strongest argument against leaving, that Scotland might decide to leave the UK, is one that will have weighed very strongly with her indeed. If she discounted it we probably can. In any case Sottish independence makes much less sense even than at the time of the referendum. Oil is very cheap. 

Someone described her as 'Elizabeth the Useless' for her failure to prevent the disastrous things that happened to her country since she acceded to the throne, but probably she was powerless to help. She has great influence, though, I am told. 

Against David Cameron's and John Major's advice that we stay in we can weigh the view of former Tory leaders Michael Howard, Ian Duncan Smith and Margaret Thatcher that we leave. William Hague and Jeremy Corbyn say that they are in favour of staying in - in Hague's case he was probably never the Eurosceptic he pretended to be, and he was institutionalised by the Foreign Office. In Corbyn's case he is betraying his principles for partisan advantage.

On reflection, hereditary monarchs are not infallible. Francis Joseph is responsible for the end of liberal Europe by declaring war on Serbia in 1914. Neagu Djuvara says that the end of European civilisation is inevitable but perhaps it happened a hundred years ago.

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