Prince Charles Shakes Gerry Adams' Hand: Peter Hitchens Asks Uncomfortable Questions

OS is completely unsuitable for membership in the Royal Family. How does he arrive at this profound insight, the gentle reader asks....

Well, Gentle Reader: If my uncle had been murdered, along with two children, by Irish terrorists, I don't think I'd be shaking hands with one of the people who prominently cheered the event, and subsequent events like unto it. Especially if there was never a hint of a subsequent apology.

Call me, well, simple-minded. I just wouldn't have any desire to make small talk over G&T's with such a man.

HItchens, as always, is much more eloquent.

I have more than once refused to shake Mr Adams’s hand. That was more than 20 years ago, when I asked him some awkward questions during his visits to the USA, so much so that, on the one occasion we were alone together, he made his strong displeasure very clear (in public he always feigned friendliness). Not long afterwards he called for me to be ‘decommissioned’. I suspect he’s not the only person who has hoped for this.

By contrast, Prince Charles (who had read one of my books) once expressed an interest in meeting me, and I was alerted to expect an invitation. But the future King was scared off by his advisers, who said it would do him grave harm if it ever got out. Well now look who he’s meeting, and being praised for it, too.

How strange to live in a country where the heir to the throne would rather publicly clasp the hand of a Republican apologist for political murder than privately meet a loyal patriot and monarchist. But there it is. Nothing is but what is not. We must learn to live our lives backwards, sideways, every way but straightforwardly.

Those are chilling words, that final sentence. But there they are, and they do ring true...

BTW, OS is also unsuitable for life around Westminster and Downing Street.  Turns out, Her Majesty's government has spent the ensuing years since Mountbatten's murder deliberately not pursuing the perpetrators...