Prince Philip and I had a cuppa at Government House, Melbourne, in March 1981 but since then we seem to have lost touch. The Duke of Edinburgh was handing out his gold awards to school students; my mother was impressed that he remembered each of our names as we mingled in the gardens afterwards. The Prince considered the awards scheme to be his greatest achievement, sending hundreds of thousands of Commonwealth lads and lasses tramping the wilds and serving the needy and generally toughening up.

Forty years on, I tuned in to his funeral at one of those moments of British nobleness: strains of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ in military trumpets resounding off the walls of Windsor’s courtyard: ‘I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, ‘til we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.’

Then the perfection of the service itself: the mediaeval glory of soaring stone and glass, rich music chosen by this robustly Christian prince to give thanks to his maker, and the sense of being elevated to an adult world of thought and seriousness as the King James Bible reminded the gathered royals that dust they are and to dust they shall return. Dust, but beloved.

Yes, I stood for the final ‘God save the Queen’, seeing that lonely figure in her Covid isolation, surely the most faithful and unifying person in the world today. Few patients of mine who are bereaved at such an age live long before going to join their spouse; grief seems to divide their heart and drop their resistance.

While we have the Queen, she is a taproot into the ancient culture of the English-speaking peoples, a thousand years deep in monarchy and two thousand deep in faith; when she goes, the deracination will be swift.

When my grandparents attended the Queen’s coronation in 1953 as representatives of Northern Rhodesia, the oath they heard Queen Elizabeth take was little changed from the coronation oath of King Edgar a thousand years earlier in 973, where he vowed ‘to defend the land, uphold its laws, protect its church, and rule justly’.

In turn, Edgar’s anointing as king was modelled on the anointing of King Solomon. The only moment at the Queen’s coronation that was hidden from the television viewer was the anointing, as that was deemed a sacred moment between the monarch and God; the Queen being the head of the Church of England and ‘defender of the faith’.

But then there’s her successor, Prince Charles. He does not want to be defender of ‘the faith’ but just ‘faith’, including no doubt a heartfelt eco-pantheism. Who knows what bits of the ancient coronation will be reworked and rewoked to honour global Gaia. He has already conscripted another solemn occasion to that cause: on Remembrance Day last year, our future monarch put on a poppy and spoke to the world about… the Great Reset!

This nakedly globalist, quasi-socialist scheme harnesses global panic about Covid and climate change and calls for revolution. The Great Reset is championed by all the usual suspects from the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the mega corporations as well as celebrities like Prince Charles and Pope Francis.

Under the Great Reset, we are told by the official material, ‘You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy’. Further channelling Marx, it declares, ‘Capitalism as we know it, is dead’. And in a sideswipe at the bourgeois farmers of Australia, it tells us, ‘You will eat much less meat. An occasional treat, not a staple, for the good of the environment.’

Antonio Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations and former socialist prime minister of Portugal, confirms that the UN’s manufactured panic over global warming is central to this globalist power grab. He says that ‘advancing the transition to net zero emissions’ is an essential ‘element of the Great Reset’.

Next on the video, up pops Prince Charles with poppy in place, warning us, ‘We are literally at the last hour and there is real urgency for action…. We need a shift in our economic model that places Nature, and our shift to net zero, at the heart of how we operate.’

‘Literally at the last hour’? This from the Prince of Whale-sized exaggerations who told us in 2009 that we have ‘just 96 months left to save the world’ from ‘irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse’. When that excitable hyperbole expired in 2017, His Royal Highness issued a shorter deadline ‘to keep climate change to survivable levels’. That new prophecy of doom expired in January just past.

If Charles were to become King, will he be merely the latest in a long line of monarchs who seek to impose economic burdens and restrictive laws on his subjects? That may not work out so well, given the first King Charles was beheaded in 1649 for attempting ‘to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people’. As Daniel Hannan writes, ‘The story of the English-speaking peoples is the story of how they imposed their will upon their rulers’. His splendid book, How we invented freedom, traces Anglo-Saxon people-power from the taming of King Æthelred in the 11th century to the barons bringing King John to heel in the 13th, through the Civil War (Charles I beheaded) and Glorious Revolution (James II exiled) and finally the American revolutionaries defying George III’s taxes in the 18th.

If our Charles were to be just another bad king in this line of bad kings, beheading is probably not an option but exile surely is.

I propose banishment to a Pacific island where he can watch the shoreline failing to submerge or to Antarctica to watch the sea-ice failing to decline or to the Arctic to watch the polar bears failing to perish.

If only some more of Prince Philip’s rugged good sense – including climate scepticism – had rubbed off on his son! Well might we say, ‘God save the Queen’, because if Charles doesn’t desist from politically divisive posturing, nothing will save the monarchy.