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<\/p>\nHave I boasted before that my grandfather, Dermot Morrah, wrote possibly the most famous and frequently quoted speech ever delivered by our late, beloved Queen? Well, you’ll have to forgive me, because I’m going to brag about it again.<\/p>\n
The speech I mean was the one she broadcast on her 21st birthday in 1947, in which she said: ‘I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.’<\/p>\n
He also wrote speeches for the late Queen’s father, George VI. For this purpose, the Palace issued him with a booklet of instructions, listing combinations of consonants and vowels he would have to avoid, since the King’s crippling stammer (highlighted in that beautiful film, the King’s Speech) made them agonisingly difficult for him to utter.<\/p>\n
This made writing for George VI something of a mind game \u2014 a challenge to which my grandfather was admirably suited, since he was a veritable wizard at cryptic crossword puzzles.<\/p>\n
Indeed, he was so good at the Times crossword that he seldom bothered to fill in the grid, completing the puzzle in his head \u2014 a talent he retained right up until the end.<\/p>\n
When he was on his deathbed, a nurse noticed that he’d left the crossword blank, though he’d been looking at it for almost ten minutes.<\/p>\n
‘Oh dear, are you stuck?’ she said.<\/p>\n
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TOM UTLEY: Look, Steve Coogan, if you really want to get rid of the monarchy, abandon Israel and muzzle the Free Press, why not stand for office yourself!<\/p>\n
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Aerial photo taken by drone shows the destruction in the middle of Gaza city by Israel bombs on Tuesday October 17<\/p>\n
When he told her that he’d finished it in his head, she called him an old fibber. She changed her tune, however, when he started reeling off all the answers from memory.<\/p>\n
But I’m straying from my point this week, which is that my grandfather was a passionate monarchist \u2014 whose earliest memory, he once told me, was of crying in front of Queen Victoria’s portrait upstairs in the nursery on the day she died in 1901, when he was four years old.<\/p>\n
Such was his lifelong enthusiasm that he wrote several books about the Royal Family, including the first authorised biography of our present King, published when Charles III was 19 and the Prince of Wales.<\/p>\n
It was perhaps partly because of Grandpa’s example that I was brought up to take a very keen interest in the Royals. Like millions of others, or so surveys tell us, I had a recurring dream about having tea with Elizabeth II, and in my childhood I could reel off the full names not only of all her children (Charles Philip Arthur George, Andrew Albert Christian Edward etc) but those of all their cousins, uncles and aunts as well.<\/p>\n
I must admit that as I’ve aged, my youthful obsession has worn off a bit. These days, you won’t find me camping in the rain beside the Mall, under a Union Flag umbrella, hoping for a glimpse of a passing Royal. Nor would I be able to tell you, without asking Google to remind me, the name of Princess Eugenie’s husband, nor which member of the family is the Earl of Ulster’s dad (Jack Brooksbank and the Duke of Gloucester respectively, if you’re interested; I’ve just checked).<\/p>\n
But like countless others, I still take an interest in the Royal Family’s doings, its good deeds and prodigal sons \u2014 and I count myself highly fortunate to live under a constitutional monarchy.<\/p>\n
Just don’t tell the actor and comedian Steve Coogan.<\/p>\n
With lofty disdain for millions of us lesser mortals, the creator of Alan Partridge this week dismissed us supporters of the monarchy as ‘idiots’, complicit in propping up a system that oppresses workers.<\/p>\n
To be precise, he announced in a podcast: ‘Most people who are into [the Royal family] are flag-waving people who, I think, are kind of idiots because they support a power structure that keeps a foot on the throat of working-class people and I’m just not really keen on that type of people.’<\/p>\n
As for exactly what he means when he speaks of ‘keeping the foot on the throat’ of the working classes, your guess is as good as mine. It strikes me as deeply mysterious since, like so many others, I’ve always seen the monarchy as a great unifier of the nation, binding together people of all classes, creeds and colours.<\/p>\n
Equally important, for more than three centuries our kings and queens have served as guarantors of our freedom from would-be tyrants. For although they’ve had little real power themselves since the Glorious Revolution of the late 1680s, their hereditary position as our heads of state has prevented divisive politicians from getting too big for their boots.<\/p>\n
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Coogan is gracious enough, however, to concede that Elizabeth II might have had something to be said for her. ‘The Queen worked very hard,’ he says. ‘So she’s all right…’ (big of him!) ‘but the rest of them are problematic for me’<\/p>\n
Coogan is gracious enough, however, to concede that Elizabeth II might have had something to be said for her. ‘The Queen worked very hard,’ he says. ‘So she’s all right…’ (big of him!) ‘but the rest of them are problematic for me’.<\/p>\n
Oh, and he even has one good word to say for our present king, telling the comedy food podcast, Off Menu, that he has a weakness for his Waitrose Duchy Organic orange juice.<\/p>\n
‘It’s interesting,’ he says, ‘because I buy that stuff and go, “I don’t like having a Royal Family, but I do like his produce”, so I feel a bit torn.’<\/p>\n
Perhaps he will understand me, then, when I say that I feel similarly torn about Steve Coogan. I think he’s an absolutely wonderful actor, as many will agree if they saw his recent portrayal of the vile Jimmy Savile in the BBC’s four-parter, The Reckoning. In my view, he was amazingly convincing as that revoltingly arrogant, bullying pervert.<\/p>\n
But why doesn’t he stick to what he’s so brilliant at, instead of boring and annoying so many of his fans with his half-baked views, unfailingly delivered with the air of a man who believes he is right about everything, and everyone else is wrong?<\/p>\n
Of course, he is far from the only entertainer guilty of this vice. Indeed, there’s hardly a soul in his profession these days who doesn’t seize every available opportunity to preach to us from identical hymn-sheets, espousing every fashionable cause, from trans rights to reversing Brexit.<\/p>\n
But Coogan is a particularly egregious offender. Though something of a petrolhead (he collects sports cars and has a history of speeding), he has been a vocal supporter of Extinction Rebellion, signing a letter backing the oil companies’ public enemy number one.<\/p>\n
The other day \u2014 along with such fellow luvvies as Tilda Swinton, Charles Dance, Miriam Margolyes and Maxine Peake \u2014 he signed another, calling on governments to ‘end their military and political support for Israel’s actions [in Gaza]’ and accusing the West of ‘aiding and abetting’ war crimes.<\/p>\n
Issued by a group calling itself Artists For Palestine UK, the letter somehow forgot to mention the mass slaughter of Jewish men, women and children by Hamas, which provoked the Israeli response. To be fair, Coogan later made good the omission, declaring: ‘It goes without saying that what Hamas did is evil beyond imagination. It was horrific and brutal.’<\/p>\n
All I will say is that if actors insist on contributing their two penn’orth to the debate on the Middle East, they really shouldn’t allow such a detail to go without mention in their ‘look-at- me’ letters.<\/p>\n
As for his statement that he finds members of the Royal Family ‘problematic’, some might regard his own history of bedroom antics with lap-dancers, topless models, wads of cash and cocaine puts him in a poor position to preach.<\/p>\n
But of course he has a solution to that, too: gag the Press, through state regulation, so that we fans never get to hear anything that actors’ publicity agents don’t want us to.<\/p>\n
Look, Mr Coogan. If you’re really so keen to get rid of the Monarchy, stop oil, abandon Israel to its fate and muzzle the free Press, why not stand for public office yourself, instead of just calling us idiots? Then who knows what you might achieve one day?<\/p>\n
President Coogan, anyone? No, I thought not! We’re not that daft, after all.<\/p>\n