The habit which exists among many of the advocates of sensible reforms in economic policy of speaking of their "mission" to the universities or middl… - T. E. Utley

One obvious and continuous function of the monarchy is to confer approbation by word and deed on those things which, in the common judgement of most men and women of British stock, are still deemed honourable – the bonds of family love and loyalty, care for the unfortunate, respect for human personalities as distinct from dedication to the abstract rights of mankind, even hard work and enterprise. To the various scruffs who assault the monarchy these things are anathema either because they are incompatible with the total transformation of society they want or, at the very least, because they tend to make that transformation less urgently desirable than it otherwise might appear.
By upholding these simple pieties, which have worn thin among politicians, the Crown exerts a continuous subtle restraint on reckless and ruthless innovation. Hence the particular venom inspired among the dregs of radicalism by the Duke of Edinburgh, who can speak on such matters with greater freedom than the Queen and who wields that influence, not perhaps with unerring instinct, but with a beneficent effect which is the greater for not being muffled by immaculate conception.

Suppose that a revolutionary junta of corrupt oligarchy were blatantly to use the machinery of democracy to try to compass democracy's destruction. Would the Crown be wholly impotent? I do not think so.

In the hands of some of the more zealous exponents of revisionist Toryism...criticism has been developed into a general attack on the whole concept of moderation as a political virtue. This sort of thing is most unnerving to the electorate and most damaging to the Conservative party. If moderation means a wish, other things being equal or approximately so, to govern with the consent of as many of those being governed as possible, even if it means a disposition to take into account the prejudices of large sections of the electorate in formulating policy, it is no bad thing. To set about trying to reform the economy without taking into account the real force of such sentiments as loyalty to a trade union would be to court disaster.