Piers Akerman is one of our most perceptive commentators, with the strength not to be swept along with the current fashions which infect journalism, His views on the Commonwealth and The Queen are therefore not tainted by the usual obligatory genuflection to any form of republicanism.
The stars of the Commonwealth Day celebrations in Sydney, he wrote in the Daily Telegraph , 14 March, 2006, were not the many politicians, but the Commonwealth itself.
“Sneered at and derided as an over-the-hill organisations of post-colonial relics, the collection of 51 nations still stands head and shoulders ahead of such hate-riven outfits as the United Nations as a model of international goodwill and cooperation, as the conduct of the Commonwealth Games — they are the truly friendly ones — demonstrates.”
Then in the Saturday Daily Telegraph, 18 March 2006 comparing The Queen and the US Secretary of State ( this is not online) he wrote”:
“The Queen draws her strength from centuries of tradition tempered by her own experience in a family which, in notable contrast to a number of other European royal families, stood by its subjects during the worst days of Nazi Germany’s attempt to impose a godless rule over Europe, and remained in London during the blitz as parts of the city were reduced to rubble….She is the Crown, the symbolic heart..”