Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense
Recently a Gfk NOP survey of a thousand people commissioned by the historian Peter Hennessy on behalf of the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme suggested that almost eighty percent of British people still believe in our Monarchy.
As with all opinion polls, exactly which questions are asked and how they are presented (in this case by telephone) is of paramount importance in ascertaining whether a survey is of any justifiable significance.
Unfortunately however, it would appear that the data for this latest poll on the Monarchy commissioned for the BBC seems to still be held privately with no indication of whether it will become publicly available in the future.
In any case, at face value I think we can safely presume that this survey confirms what most people already knew; that the Monarchy is still popular in Britain among the general public - though certainly not among our governing elites, grandees and the liberal media.
The poll comes, not by accident, at a time when Her Majesty recently made history by surpassing Queen Victoria as the longest serving British Monarch, and also coincides with the annual release of the Royal accounts officially detailing precisely how much the Monarchy has cost the taxpayer.
