John Blunt column

AS the unforgettable Diana hysteria fades along with the ocean of flowers, the prime question left hanging over the country is: Where does the monarchy go from here?

But it is not as if the question has been raised by the remarkable and unfathomable reaction to Diana's death.

Nor by the consequent surge of irate so-called People Power that forced the supposedly out-of-touch royals out of their Balmoral bolthole, made the Queen respond to the challenge with her TV broadcast and put the protocol-busting Union Jack at half-mast on Buckingham Palace.

These events have only advanced the issue. For, surely, the future of the monarchy was already being seriously questioned.

And this was well in train before the House of Windsor was made to respond in near panic to the new unpopularity heaped on it in return for the royal family's alleged cruel treatment of the people's Queen of Hearts when she was alive, and its seemingly aloof response to the people's feelings once she was dead.

Royalty's stock was at its lowest-ever ebb with the public even before the unprecedented flood of emotion over Diana - and, it has to be said, the extraordinary deluge of sugary mawkishness that used to have no part in once-stoic British displays of national mourning.

Only a month ago, a public opinion poll showed how popular support for the royals had plunged from 70 per cent to 48 per cent in three years. True, the ending of the fairy-tale Charles and Diana marriage may have contributed to that decline.

And, despite the hasty tempering response of royal walkabouts and amendments to protocol, last week's backlash may now have hastened it.

But wasn't a long process of erosion of royalty's majesty, respect for it and the need for it afoot in any case?

It is, if you ask me, down to the healthy influence, not of any incipient new republican strain in the public's outlook, but of a new generation's attitude.

Many people now decline to regard the Crown as a symbol of an ideal that is to be automatically deferred to - and paid for.

More and more of the new generation asks what the hell the Royal Family are - and, especially so at present, who the hell do they think they are?

This is not so much disloyalty, but reality.

An increasingly classless, self-thinking society does not look up to the monarchy but equally in the eye.

It questions the very basis of its existence and either scoffs or laments at the notion of it being the vehicle for the supposedly perfect family.

Of course now, with the threat to its future underlined by Diana - perceived as the one royal with the common touch whom the royals sacked - the belief is that the monarchy must modernise and acquire the common touch themselves.

Yet whether this attitude would be changed by such steps as Charles making way for William or, as one Labour MP advocates, by any future monarch having to survive a referendum on whether Britain should have an elected or hereditary head of state is, surely, academic. We may well, in the meantime, yet see displays of the royal common touch manifested in acts of Diana-style people friendliness - such as cuddling sick babies instead of blasting gamebirds to death.

But the natural and unstoppable process of dispensing with the monarchy may well be underway.

Unless our Monarchy sees the light, the Queen of Hearts' legacy may be that of being the one who put the foot on the accelerator - with her ironic place in history being that of the sacked royal who toppled the Crown.

Making profit out of tragedy

IT IS not as if the Diana, Princess of Wales, Memorial Fund needs any boosting, given the staggering rate at which donations have flooded in.

But, at a time when it is estimated that sales of the recording of Elton John's funeral tribute, Candle In The Wind, will raise £10million for the charity by becoming the best-selling single of all time, I wonder if others in a similar position have been moved make a similar contribution.

I refer to the nation's florists who have made a fortune out of Diana's misfortune and the country's amazing response to the tragedy. Surely, if there was ever a case for a public gesture of giving something back, this is it.

I only ask. As, I am sure, others do.

Wife's dirty tactics pay off

EAST Lancashire farmer's wife Lesley Jackson had a sure-fire way of shifting travellers when they illegally invaded her land with 20 caravans.

Rather than wait for the slow-coach law - it would have taken £250 and seven days to get a court order against them - she threatened to shower them with slurry.

And they were off like slurry off a shovel.

Good for her. But more than this, don't we need something equally as effective when it comes to dealing with these anti-social people who exploit the law's tardiness when they dump themselves unwantedly on private property and, frequently, leave a nasty and expensive mess behind?

Until the law catches up with effective action, Mrs Jackson should consider renting out her muck cart to others hit by this do-as-you-please caravan crowd.

The opinions expressed by John Blunt are not necessarily those of this newspaper.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.