Australians for Constitutional Monarchy

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More information reveals that the behaviour of the Mail on Sunday in publishing a private journal of the Prince of Wales was even more reprehensible than appeared before.

This is set out in a report in the Daily Telegraph of 22 February, 2006, by Caroline Davies,headlined : “Secretary got cold feet, realising her terrible mistake”

Sir Michael Peat, the Prince's principal private secretary, said in his witness statement that the duties of a member of staff, Miss Sarah Goodall, had included photocopying the Prince's hand-written travel journals and distributing them to chosen recipients. She was dismissed in 2000 for reasons unrelated to this case.

Miss Goodall admitted to another member of the Prince’s staff that she had made copies of some extracts from the journals which she thought were amusing. She then took them home thinking that one day the journals might be worth publishing.

She had recently thought of selling them to the newspapers. So she asked a friend to approach the Mail on Sunday. The Mail had been given "about 50 pages".

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We have accordingly warned our supporters, for their own safety, never to stand between a group of republicans and royalty, any royalty. Otherwise you will be knocked over in the rush.

The Australian editorial on 24 February, 2006, “Charmed we’re sure ” discusses this curiosity.

“Although in the end she finally did go through with it, one could be forgiven for mistaking expat feminist extraordinaire Germaine Greer's curtsy to the Queen for a slight stoop in response to a sudden minor seizure of the lower back….”

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According to the London Daily Telegraph, 22 February, 2006, Germaine Greer has curtseyed to The Queen: 

For a republican, says the Telegraph, it probably hurts to curtsey before a monarch.And not just a republican. As The Australian observes, she is a critic of British imperialism, an honorary Aborigine and proponent of an Aboriginal republic.

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On 1 December, 2005, in a column headed “Newspaper invades Prince's privacy” we said that for far too long, some in the media have decided that the ethical and legal constraints on publishing material about anyone, including journalists, editors and media moguls, do not apply to the Royal Family: 

We suggested that this treatment of the Royal Family might be coming to an end. The Prince of Wales had, with reluctance and under extreme provocation, instituted legal proceedings against The Mail on Sunday.

The Mail had been warned, not once but five times, that if it published, it would be a breach of the Prince's extracts from a private journal copyright and a breach of confidentiality.

Despite this the editor went ahead and published the extracts. And not only does the Mail have a copy of this private journal, it has copies of eight others written over many years .

The journal in question, “The Handover of Hong Kong, or the Great Chinese Takeaway” related to the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong to the Peoples’ Republic of China.

It was clearly private. As Sir Michael Peat, the Prince's principal private secretary, said:

“Like everybody else, the Prince of Wales is entitled to write a private journal without extracts being published."

Caroline Davies, has reported the latest developments in the case in the London Daily Telegraph of 22 February 2006.

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It was hardly an intervention – he was just speaking commonsense.

All he said was that some people think that “just by cutting ties with the monarchy that we will go into a land of milk and honey, but that is not necessarily the case".

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Over the next few months, from the Royal visit to the end of the year, ACM will be celebrating Her Majesty’s eightieth birthday, her service to the nation and the central role the Crown plays in it. That is our ACM theme for 2006.

Our first function will be a lunch at Parliament house on Tuesday, April 11. Then there will be a lunch in Brisbane on Friday, 21 April, 2006, where the host will be Major General “Digger “James. I shall be speaking at both lunches and at a dinner on the Gold Coast on Tuesday, 28 February, 2006.

We are still waiting for details concerning the Royal Visit-as soon as they are available, we shall post them to the site.

In addition, there is to be a seminar hosted by two universities in Brisbane on 21 April, about bicameralism-Queensland is the only state not to have an upper house. A strong view emerged at our last annual conference that there was a need for such a check and balance in Queensland.

Details of all these events will soon be posted to the site.

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In his column in The Australian on 21 February, 2006, Philip Adams argued that the Constitution erects a wall of separation between church and state, and that the High Court was wrong to allow the funding of church schools. Such funding is actually a matter to be determined politically, not constitutionally.

His column is headed 'Let politics and religion follow their separate paths: Whatever happened to the idea of a separation between church and state?'.

I sent the following  letter to The Australian:

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Until this year, he was chairman of the ARM, which Mr. David Marr, formerly of the ABC TV Media Watch programme and now a leading opinion writer on The Sydney Morning Herald, describes as “near comatose”

By attacking the Governor-General, he only demonstrated that he is apparently unaware of some of the sillier claims made by republicans over the years and even now.

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Prestige is an immediately recognizable quality, easily lost, and difficult to define and to acquire.

The United Kingdom still has it. The Queen, above all, has it. Some prime ministers have it-Churchill, McMillan, Thatcher and Blair.

The hard headed French squeeze the very last drop of prestige from everything they have, even from as unlikely an instrument as their tainted president.

HMY Britannia had it - in spades, as those correspondents to the London Daily Telegraph whose letters we recently summarised have so well testified. Not so long ago, several times in every year, the great and powerful in some distant harbour would give almost anything to come to pay tribute to The Queen and to be received on that great Royal Yacht , with the music and the pomp that can only surround the Throne. This applies equally to those who claim disinterest and even to those who given half the chance would dismantle the Crown.

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