Wedding cake and roses

Originally published @ 11:20 pm, Tue 30th Nov 2010

Fans of the Royal Family might have expected columnists from newspapers like The Mirror to raise concerns about the cost of a Royal Wedding and the possible distraction of the people from the big issues of the day.

What they might not have expected was for two more conventional tabloids to run polls on who should be the next monarch, with findings showing the public would prefer a jump of a generation to Prince William over Prince Charles. Won’t actually happen; it’s not like people actually have a vote. (If there was, I wonder what kind of system would be used. A compulsory vote with an option of “none of the above”? Or a telephone poll with all proceeds paying for the civil list?)

The papers are full of the romance and the wedding, as well as talent and humiliation shows, triggering the kind of pessimism echoed by the Mirror columnists. The concern being that claims (like those of David Cameron recently) that the immigration problems the country has been dealing with concerned largely with flows from outside of the EU are going insufficiently challenged (it was not a line I remember being used before the General Election).

But it seems that opinions polls were unaffected at the time of Charles and Diana wedding. Nor were the ConDems able to bury Lord Young’s comments about the “so-called recession” actually benefitting people; so they had to bury him instead.

I do think it's a shame that the wedding has been called for April 29th, since -

1. it would be better for the country to be focussed on the local elections and the national referendum;

2. as "Have I got news for you" reported, it's the same date that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun got married.