High points for Prince Charles for his speech to (and on behalf of) his Mummy & Daddy

One of the virtues of YouTube is that you can get a sense for how a speech went down by inspecting the unsolicited comments that viewers have added.

Here are the first 10 (of 208) listed at the time I looked at this particular clip of Prince Charles' speech at his mother's Diamond Jubilee - and I don't think I've ever seen so many consecutive positive comments about a speech on YouTube:


"Charles - that was a class speech. Witty, humorous, thoughtful and loving. Good man."
"What I love most about this video is that we get to see the Queen show some emotion which unfortunately we don't get to see very often because she's the Queen. Proud to be British and proud to say we have her as our Queen!"
"King like speech so proud to be british well done charles"
"Never got the animosity to Charles. Glad to see he's turning the tide."
"He will make a great King!"
"makes you jolly proud to be british!"
"This was a really great speech. Witty, thoughtful, and charming."
"What a great weekend, and an equally superb speech from Charles, the best I have ever heard him give, hats off to you sir! I pray this will light the blue touch paper and we can find it in our hearts to start talking the country back up again."

"Great speech..really touching...given me a whole new level of respect for Charles and co."

"Him saying mommy humanizes him - great"

Sullen celebs in the background? 

I've written and blogged before about the dangers of allowing other members of an audience to be seen behind the speaker who's speaking.

Here, the Prince of Wales might think about awarding his stage managers the order of the boot - because the first negative, and, in my opinion totally reasonable, question on YouTube was "Why do Elton John and Paul McCartney look so grumpy?"

Royal Family planning?

Watching a Jubilee programme the other night, in which Prince Charles was showing some cine film from his early life taken by his parents, I was struck by the number of times he referred to his sister (Princess Anne) and/or something that he and she were doing - compared with no references at all to his two younger siblings, Princes Andrew and Edward.

Given the gap between the Queen's two batches of children, this was hardly surprising: Charles is less than two years older than than Anne, but is 11 and 15 years older than Princes Andrew and Edward respectively.

My father's theory

Had he still been alive, I'd have been able to interrogate my father on his theory about why the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh decided to have a second batch of children after an eleven year gap. 

His line was that, having decided against home tuition in favour of schools for their first two children's education, the Queen and Prince Philip had started to worry that letting them get a taste for the 'real world' might change their attitudes towards the desirability (or otherwise) of becoming monarch. 

At worst, what would happen to the House of Windsor if both Charles and Anne decided it wasn't the job  for them?

So the obvious answer (to him) was to have some more children to reduce the chances of our hereditary monarchy dying out through a shortage of willing recruits.

A grain of truth?

I've never heard anyone (other than my father) even speculate about what, if anything, the Queen and Prince Philip's family planning strategy might have been - let alone that there might have been a grain of truth to his theory.

Given that journalists and the media haven't been shy when it comes to speculating about so many other details about the private lives of the Royal Family over the past 60 years, I find this rather odd.

And, more than half a century since my father raised the question, it still intrigues me enough to hope that there might be a royal correspondent somewhere who can enlighten us on the matter...

Chariots of fire and adverts come to Wells

The Olympic Torch came to Wells, Somerset, today and attracted quite a crowd, including all these people waiting expectantly on Cathedral Green. I hadn't intended to go (honest) but the glorious weather proved too much for me - and here are some pictures and a video taken by mistake on an iPhone with a screen that's more or less invisible on a sunny day.

I suppose someone has to pay for it all, but I hadn't expected to see specially designed chariots advertising Coca Cola and Samsung coming into Sadler Street a few minutes before the torch itself:

Then, when the moment everyone had been waiting for finally arrived, I hadn't expected the torch bearer still to be wearing his pyjamas. Nor had I expected the honour of carrying the torch to be given to someone who looked about as keen on running as I am...

Laughs from Liberal Lords

Regular readers will know that I take a very dim view of the way successive governments have avoided doing anything about how seats in the House of Lords are allocated (e.g. HERE).

So, although I find myself much closer to Lord Ashdown's position on House of Lords reform than that of Lord Phillips of Sudbury, I spent quite a lot of time yesterday trying to find a clip of the above that could be embedded here - for purely entertainment purposes, you understand.

It's a reminder to those of us who bemoan the passing of the Jimmy Young Show on BBC Radio 2 of one of the regular features that made it so worth listening to. In his former life, Lord Phillips was better known as the solicitor Andrew Phillips, who appeared with Jimmy Young as the 'legal eagle' giving legal advice to listeners from 1976-2002.

Loss of the good natured banter between him and Jimmy Young is but one of the many reasons why I've hardly ever listened to the programme since it became the Jeremy Vine Show.

Another is that I thought that David Aaronovich, one of the occasional stand-ins for Sir Jimmy, made a far better job of it than Mr Vine has ever done - but, for reasons best known to the BBC, didn't get the job when they decreed that the time had come for Jimmy Young to retire.