In a broadcast last Thursday Colonel Gaddafi compared himself to the Queen as another long-serving personage with no power: "People like the Queen of Britain, Elizabeth II, don't have the authority to enact official rules and that's exactly like my situation," he raved.
Ha: don't mess with our monarch, Muammar! The Queen scarcely interrupted her Sunday afternoon tea at Windsor Castle to freeze his assets. At a brief meeting of the privy council she (with a little help from the British government) prevented the Colonel, four of his sons and a daughter, from getting their hands on a reported £3bn of ill-gotten assets apparently moved secretly to a Mayfair-based private wealth manager last week.
Although there are actually 594 privy counsellors, many of them ministers and former ministers of all parties, only three were needed on Sunday: George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury and Sir George Young, MP for North West Hampshire, whose day jobs include being Leader of the Commons and Lord Privy Seal, and who was present apparently because he happened to be available. Three represents a quorum, although four privy counsellors usually turn up in case one gets delayed: only serving government ministers take decisions, and they travel to see the Queen.
Although the privy council – a centuries-old group of the monarch's privy (ie, private) advisers – technically take all the government's executive decisions, Sunday's meeting was actually called under the terms of the United Nations Act of 1946 under which the privy council authorises actions mandated by the UN.
There is no word on whether the Queen offered the privy counsellors tea before they set off back up the M4 and she settled down to watch the Antiques Roadshow. Bet the Colonel wishes he had powers like that.
