David Selzer is a writer of poetry, prose fiction, screenplays and stage plays. He embraces digital platforms to share his work of more than fifty years… READ MORE


  • THE DISGUISED REPUBLIC

    For Mark Chapman, PPC

    So well is our real government concealed, that if you tell a cabman to drive to ‘Downing Street’ he most likely will never have heard of it…It is only a ‘disguised republic’, which is suited to such a being as the Englishman in such a century as the nineteenth.

    THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION, Walter Bagehot, 1867.

    HM’s Garden Parties turn the Bagehot trick,

    showing GB as it really, really is:

    the Law, the Cloth, clerks, hacks, uniforms,

    diplomats, local government officers

    and the odd charity bod – some wearing gloves!

    Strangely, though there are two regimental bands,

    there aren’t enough chairs, the ice cream runs out

    and so many guests leave early – out

    into London’s levelling traffic.

    Fresh from the slaughter at Culloden,

    the Duke of Cumberland’s men created

    Virginia Water, a little bit

    of highland wilderness in Surrey

    – the land, a gift from the Duke’s grateful dad,

    Her Present Majesty’s great-great-great-

    granddad, for stuffing the Scots for good.

    And it’s still in the family – with all

    those acres and paintings and pottery,

    liveries and lackeys, vanity and greed.

    How well they obscure where real power lies!



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