Did Blair do it? Part II
The current issue of The Spectator contains an article by Peter Oborne titled "How Blair betrays the Crown" (subscription required). To Osborne's outrage, the PM opted for Rome over Windsor last Friday: "Rather than await the decision from the Prince, Downing Street indicated instantly that Tony Blair would go to Rome." Osborne continues:
"No prime minister has ever attended a papal funeral before, and with good reason. Britain is not a Roman Catholic country — though admittedly anyone who has read the British newspapers over the past few days might be forgiven for supposing that it was. The papacy stands for autocratic and hierarchical principles and attachments to ancient dogmas that are alien to the British state."
Some might find it a bit rich of a royalist such as Osborne to bash an organization for "autocratic and hierarchical principles", no? Regardless, because the Vatican regards the Church of England as aberrant he goes on: "This is what made it such an audacious decision by the Prime Minister to abandon his duties to the British Crown and travel to the Vatican instead." That's strong, "abandon his duties to the British Crown." The reason for the bile is that the Prince of Wales ended up appearing, once again, a spineless pawn.
So who told, er, advised Charles to postpone his wedding and go to Rome? Why, his mum, of course. And here one must say that the late pontiff would have been pleased as he wasn't too keen on registry office weddings and neither is the Queen as she boycotted her son's on Saturday. With half the guests in Rome anyway, what was he going to do? Go ahead without them? Some stories doing the rounds have it that the Archbishop of Canterbury was the first to insist that the Prince of Wales represent the Queen in Rome. Charles is said to have strongly resisted the suggestion. But then the Queen put her foot doing and in doing so it appears that she was respecting the wishes of the Prime Minister, who accepted the invitation to the Pope's funeral at a time when the wedding was still scheduled for Friday. That was the decisive move. No wonder Peter Osborne is furious.
"The strange death of Protestant England" was the headline in the Guardian the next day. It continued, "Catholicism hasn't been this chic since Bloody Mary burned Rowan Williams's first Protestant predecessor at the stake." The Mail On Sunday showed how good its sources are when it revealed "Safe in heaven". But best of all, The Mirror printed a "memorial issue" and proclaimed "John Paul the Great." Conservative Party leader Michael Howard told the Catholic Herald that he saw no reason why the monarch should not be a Catholic — or marry one.
No one should expect a rebirth of Catholicism in Britain but what the historian Mark Almond calls "the hollowing-out of the Protestant Succession" is a fact and Tony Blair is hurrying it along.
