I spoke up for the Queen at Oxford’s debate… and was jeered – Telegraph.co.uk

The news that students at Magdalen College, Oxford have voted to remove a portrait of the Queen from their Middle Common Room because she represents recent colonial history, normally wouldnt cause such a kerfuffle. Student politics have always been bombastically idealistic at best, drearily predictable at worst. But the furore that has been ignited by the woke warriors latest move to cancel the Queen, brandishing her a symbol of colonialism, has come in the heat of a wider cultural war where an air-punching younger generation is hellbent on showing its elders the folly of their ways.

Last week, I saw up close the whites of the eyes of this feisty breed, powered by the invincibility of their woke beliefs, baying for the blood of institutional figureheads such as the Queen, when I was invited to oppose an Oxford Union debate with the motion: This House would abolish the monarchy.

The debate was scheduled immediately after Harry and Meghans Oprah interview, when the blurb raged: As scandal after scandal shakes the family, the legitimacy of our monarchy seems to hang in the balance. Should we protect an iconic symbol of Britain or stand against a corrupt system of rule? Can we justify the monarchys existence or are its faults too great for Britain to bear?

Controversial debates are nothing new, of course. Think of the 1933 debate in which undergraduates famously passed the motion: This House would under no circumstances fight for its King and country. The result, which polarised Britain, was significant domestically, and embarrassing internationally.

There was an echo of that past outrage when I entered the debating chamber to put forward my defence of the monarchy a tangible feeling that the outcome was portentous, as in 1933, not just spirited student joshing. It seemed to connect to a wider woke mood, currently pervading life, which threatens our academic institutions, workplaces and most of all, our right to speak out, even if it challenges the current cultural zeitgeist.

The poster children for this movement are the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who incessantly bandy their truth about race, mental health neglect and poor parenting. And it felt very much like the Sussexes have whipped the young into an empathetic frenzy which the republicans seized to their advantage in the Oxford debating hall last Thursday. Graham Smith, CEO of Republic, a pressure group that campaigns for the abolition of the UK monarchy and Dr Ken Ritchie, the founder of Labour for a Republic, a Labour-affiliated pressure group, presented a jaw-dropping picture of the Queen as some malevolent Svengali figure to the loudest whoops and jeers of approval by the audience.

While the atmosphere crackled with the reassuring electricity of lively conjecture, the students cheered and clapped when the humourless Smith pronounced that the Royal family was a racist institution by default, as well as being anti-Catholic, immoral, unethical, wrong in principle and corrupt. He said that the Queen wilfully used public office for private gain and was sinister. What felt more sinister was the undisguised loathing that the republicans held for Her Majesty and I truly fear the moment when they further unleash their rabble-rousing venom.

I spoke last, weighing in against Smith and his wildly inaccurate and disturbing caricature of the Windsors. Instead of the status, subjugation and superiority that he hollered on about, I suggested he should consider the life of service of the senior Royals. It was absurd to insist, as he did, that the Royal familys charity work was trifling and that they werent an obvious tourist draw. Would The Mall be lined with well-wishers if Boris Johnson moved into Buckingham Palace, I wondered?

When I proposed that the Queen was an inspiring feminist, I was booed, and later jeered for suggesting that instead of watering down the trappings of the monarchy, we should consider that nowhere in the world can replicate our crowd-swelling pomp and pageantry.

I cant remember any roar of applause when I said that the Queen represents continuity and stability, brilliantly binding our nation. And that while Prince Philip was her strength and stay, to abolish the monarchy would be to rid the country of its own strength and stay. I did get some laughs when I explained that the Queen was Britains best trade ambassador given the advantages of a Royal warrant to business.

Weary of the earlier endless slurs that the Queen and the Royal family were racist, I then braved the view we had no actual evidence of this. I suggested that Meghan was positioning herself on the world stage exactly where she wanted to be, so she could reign as an anti-establishment heroine to her adoring woke subjects. This was met with gasps of horror. As we know from Piers Morgans fate at GMB, to challenge Meghan these daysis to commit heresy.

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I spoke up for the Queen at Oxford's debate... and was jeered - Telegraph.co.uk