The forthcoming visit of the next in line to the Australian throne reminds us of the farcical nature of our current constitutional arrangements. Senior correspondent Barry Everingham comments.

The Former King Edward VIII and Mrs Wallis-Simpson with Adolf Hitler.

THE FORTHCOMING visit to Australia of our next hereditary monarch and his wife will rekindle in the minds of royalists, and those interested in the comings and goings of the world’s most extraordinary family, the momentous events of 1937 that catapulted Queen Elizabeth to the throne of Australia.

Charles and Camilla were saved the odium heaped upon Charles’ great uncle King Edward VIII and his then lover, the twice divorced lady from Baltimore, Mrs Wallis Simpson.

Indeed, the leaders of the then collection of countries known as the British Empire were to a nation against the King marrying his paramour and the British government, in a display of raw bastardry, made a union impossible. After fleeing England, the couple married as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and swapped the royal throne for that of international café society.

But not before the Duke was cut off from his family and his wife deprived of the right by an Act of Parliament  to be addressed as Your Royal Highness  (the Depriving Act of 1937) which outraged the then editor of  Burke’s Peerage, the British bible of social rank, who called it

‘…the most flagrant act in the whole history of our dynasty’.

Charles and Camilla were saved such ignominy, even though both – unlike Edward and Wallis – admitted adultery while married to their former spouses.

And it is now known the Commonwealth countries of which Charles will become king were not consulted, nor their opinions sought, on the suitability of the couple to marry. Indeed taped late night telephone conversations between the couple were released by the Murdoch press, and those calling a 1300 number were fascinated by Charles’ admission to Camilla that all he really wanted was

“…to be a tampon inside her”.

(Image courtesy AndyMac)

Such a romantic notion would not have crossed great Uncle David’s mind, as it has now been alleged that Mrs Simpson probably had all the confused plumbing of an hermaphrodite.

Along with the knowledge that the British abhor adultery, but go along with fornication, serial adulterers Charles and Camilla were both permitted to marry, with Camilla allowed the full status of Your Royal Highness ― but she was denied the official title of Princess of Wales, which she legally is, and was saddled with one of her second husband’s secondary titles, the Duchess of Cornwall, which she will retain until Charles becomes king, when she will be known as Queen Camilla.

The monarchists in general, and Cory Bernardi’s great and good friends Professor David Flint and Alan Jones’s in particular, go along with the canard that our Queen to be will be called something stupid like “Princess Consort”.

All this is fascinating stuff but should not be relevant to contemporary Australia.

This couple have no Australian roots – indeed the forthcoming visit will be Camilla’s first − and until our Constitution is dragged screaming into reality, it is people like Queen Elizabeth and her son and daughter-in-law who are preventing every Australian from aspiring to, or holding, our nation’s top job.

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