Little Ol' Fox Stamper Phil

In my New Year predictions for 2007 I forecast that Prince Philip and Donald Rumsfeld would become partners in a venture to build a retirement home for the diplomatically challenged called Lousy Bastards. This has yet to happen. What has happened is that the Prince has been photographed presiding over the rather brutal killing of a fox. One can imagine him even now clutching a piece of toast and stamping about in his Paisley silk dressing gown wondering why the bloody hell such things are of any possible interest to the press or their proletarian readers. I sympathise. As I have said here before, I would have nothing against blood sports if there were an equal chance of the animal or human being killed. But the Prince is a man of another age. He belongs, one feels, in 1907 or thereabouts. His imagination was not formed to cope with a world in which people worried about the sufferings of foxes. Such dislocations must come to us all. Doubtless, I shall one day find myself sitting in some plastic armchair in a 'rest' home raging against the critics' revaluation of Jeffrey Archer as the greatest novelist of his generation. Such things may be painful, but they will, surely, make death all the more welcome.