UK government ministers have been secretly offering Prince Charles a veto over proposed legislation since 2005, under a little-known law that gives the prince the right to silently kill or amend legislation if it might negatively affect his interests. The legislation the prince was consulted upon includes bills on the Olympics, road safety and gambling. No one knows the full extent of these consultations, nor what changes the prince made to the legislation before it went to Parliament. Among the prince’s assets are the Duchy of Cornwall, worth £700m, and he received £18m/year in income.

When I took my “Life in the UK” test before becoming a permanent resident, I was struck by the incoherence of the section on the UK’s “unwritten constitution,” which, to my Canadian eyes, seemed to suggest that the UK didn’t really have a constitution, just a mismash of badly articulated principles that have to be tediously litigated and contested every time they collide.

Online distributors, however, are less easy to cow. The logic of monarchism also compels Thailand’s government to intervene directly on the internet. According to Freedom Against Censorship Thailand, an NGO, it has blocked hundreds of thousands of web pages. Thailand’s efforts to curb unpalatable online material, however, are no more than a picket fence when compared with the great firewall of China. China has more users of the internet than any other country, yet its censors battle the medium, convinced that they can win. The foreign press is the easy part. There are ways around the blockage of websites that the censors do not like. But relatively few people have the will, time or money to bother finding them.

There is more to Mr Harper’s move than nostalgia, though the switch will delight veterans. They hated the merger by a Liberal government of the three forces, which gave them all green uniforms as bland as their names. It was part of an otherwise successful Liberal attempt to forge new national symbols divorced from colonial ties—they also introduced the maple-leaf flag, and promoted peacekeeping and multiculturalism—and to make them synonymous in the public mind with the party.

THERE are two kinds of Arab sovereign: those who rule from behind a veil of constitutional niceties and those who dispense with the veils. Both are meeting the challenges of the Arab spring better than the region’s fallen or beleaguered republican presidents-for-life. Yet the pressure of rising demands from restless subjects is proving harder to resist for those kings who have been nice enough to pretend to democratic leanings.

The rulers of Morocco and Jordan, kingdoms with no oil wealth and close ties to the West, have long seen fit to defend their dynasties by leaving room for mild dissent, letting loyalist parties play politics and ever promising that this game will some day be real. But in both countries repeated feints at reform since their relatively young kings took power a decade ago have not much changed the underlying rules. Muhammad VI of Morocco and Abdullah II of Jordan still hire and fire prime ministers, command national armies and tolerate little criticism of themselves, much in the way of their grandfathers. Morocco’s constitution holds the person of the king, also known as Commander of the Faithful, to be sacred and inviolate.

Such relics of divine kingship may soon go the way of Louis XVI’s head. Protest movements, not unlike those of Egypt and Tunisia, have surfaced in both countries. Dollops of state largesse, including tax breaks, bigger food subsidies and amnesties for convicts, have so far blunted their impact. But the two kings and their advisers have seen that the demise of nearby presidents was not only swift but cheered by their own subjects and foreign allies alike. So they have separately concluded it may be best to pre-empt their peoples’ demands rather than wait for them to grow angry and then fall into the now-classic losing spiral of offering too little, too late.

JEFFREY SIMPSON

Last updated Saturday, Jul. 02, 2011 10:13AM EDT

William and Kate Windsor, recently married, will some day be King and Queen of Canada.

The Windsors, visiting from England, will greet their future subjects on Parliament Hill on Canada Day. As both graduated from university and seem like intelligent people, they’ll have been briefed about some things Canadian. William will read the speeches someone else prepared and say all the appropriate things about this country. The couple will undoubtedly be given a rapturous reception, as befits the world’s newest celebrities. The royal consort’s dress choices will undoubtedly be given the closest of scrutiny, as befits the world media’s priorities.

It would be unpardonably rude not to greet the future King and Queen of Canada with courtesy. They didn’t ask for such titles. The jobs just came with the territory, so to speak, a historical hangover from which Canada can’t extricate itself. To do so would require a constitutional amendment supported by the federal government and all 10 provinces – a theoretical possibility but a practical impossibility.

So the monarchy will survive in Canada, if not thrive, although the handsome newlyweds are already such world celebrities that their appearance just might give the monarchy a puff of additional, temporary popularity.

Last summer, when the Queen and Prince Philip visited (it was her 22nd royal tour to Canada since 1952), a Harris/Decima poll revealed that 48 per cent of respondents didn’t know they were coming. Half agreed that the monarchy was a “relic of our colonial past that has no place in Canada today.”

Stephen Harper says Canadians don’t want to enter a debate over whether women should have equal rights to become heir to the British throne.

At a campaign stop on Monday, Harper was asked about the brewing debate in Britain on proposed reform that would make the first born child of a monarch – whether male or female – the next king or queen. The current rule, set out under a 300-year-old law in Britain, specifies that the eldest male child automatically becomes monarch – unless, as was the case for Queen Elizabeth, there is not a brother in the family.

Many such titled folk like a lavish lifestyle but cannot earn or afford it. So offer a deal: you pay for their helicopters, hookers and hangers-on. In return, they bring you into their social circuit, and shower stardust on yours. You will need patience: the parties are dull and the guests vapid and greedy. Building your reputation as a charming and generous host may take a couple of years. But once people have met you socially they will find it hard to see you as a murderous monster or thieving thug. Useful props in this game are yachts, private jets, racehorses, ski chalets and mansions.

(I don’t know the full context. It happened back in 1969.)

PS Harkening back to the photo, Hella Stella it does seem that you have a lot of attitude, I had not seen it as you going after Milan’s jugular.

In a few months, the British royal family will be yet again rebranded and relaunched in the panoply of a wedding. Terms like “national unity” and “people’s monarchy” will be freely flung around. Almost the entire moral capital of this rather odd little German dynasty is invested in the post-fabricated myth of its participation in “Britain’s finest hour.” In fact, had it been up to them, the finest hour would never have taken place. So this is not a detail but a major desecration of the historical record—now apparently gliding unopposed toward a baptism by Oscar.