Prince Charles has no alternative but to succeed his mother Queen Elizabeth as monarch and head of the Commonwealth.
Neither does Her Majesty have any say in the succession.
The Queen is bound by the1701 Act of Settlement requiring that a monarch’s heir must be their direct successor.
Prince Charles from early adulthood has consistently made it clear that he intends to succeed his mother.
The only path open to Prince Charles should he change his mind is to deliberately abdicate which is what his great uncle King Edward V111 did prior to his coronation.
In the event the Prince Charles-should-step-aside argument hovers around the notion that the heir is an odd cove.
Prince Charles can be said to be out of step insofar as he has led, rather than followed, contemporary thinking and thus the trends, and notably in these areas:-
- Nutrition
- Architecture
- Town planning
- Conservation
- Sociology over Science
- Ecumenism
- Moreover Prince Charles has led by example.
He introduced organic cultivation on his own substantial arable lands.
He was responsible for example, for Poundbury, a township that blends traditional British urban architecture with contemporary social imperatives.
He personally intervened to stop a number of grotesque modernist intrusions in and around the centre of London.
He foresaw the recurrence of militant religiosity when he declared that he would prefer to be the “defender” of faiths of all stripe.
He was among the first Establishment figures to declare himself a hard-line anti smoker.
No figure living today has been scrutinised so minutely and for so long as the heir to the throne.
All the more surprising therefore that so many of his critics, so often those who consider themselves to be in the vanguard of these same movements, still fail to concede that Prince Charles was preoccupied by so many of these issues before everyone else realised that they were, in fact, issues.
Prince Charles’ ability to identify and then incarnate and so early in the piece so many mainstream trends does however seem rather strange.
How did he identify the movement so popular now in Commonwealth countries such as New Zealand to subsume science into sociology?
How did he realise before any other Establishment or even official figure that he could and with advantage label himself an activist?
.Feeding the notion that Prince Charles can somehow sideline himself, or be shunted aside from the throne are what is known as the Perth Accords.
The Perth Accords, quite recent, required the unanimous support of the Commonwealth.
The accords centre on the further emancipation of Roman Catholics and of women.
If the monarch’s first born is a girl, then she would now be in the direct line of succession.
The heir to the throne may now marry a Roman Catholic.
There was not, and neither was there intended to be, anything in the Perth Accords that had any bearing at all on Prince Charles’ succession to the throne and thus to becoming the head of the Commonwealth.
It is tempting to conclude that so many in the movement that claims that Charles is not really monarch material derive from the very sector of society that deeply resents an ability that they would so dearly love to possess.
Namely, the ability to peer into the future – and then act on what is diagnosed.
Then to be vindicated by time in seeing this forecasting, once widely scoffed at, utterly vindicated in accepted and mainstream movements.
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk || Friday 11 May 2018 |||
