Yellow Brick Road?

The King should take Elton John to Australia. Everyone would want to meet him then, even if it meant eating in a crypt. Keir Starmer is probably a supporter of what such people imagine to be the German or Irish model of republicanism. If that really worked in Britain, and there is nothing genuinely non-political about it in Germany or Ireland, then David Attenborough is 98, so President Dwight it would be. He is already doing the job in tandem with the monarch.

Before he sets out for the Antipodes, the King needs to remove Boris Johnson from the Privy Council. It does not matter whether Johnson really has broken the late Queen's confidence. He claims to have done so, which would be bad enough in itself, and he makes that claim in his commercially published book, which is just the bitter, bitter end.

Yet his ostensibly Tory party has far from exorcised his unclean spirit. The Government's proposed changes to the rules about MPs' second jobs are imperfect, but Conservatives are planning to leave the House of Commons rather than comply. In some cases, there is talk of peerages in Rishi Sunak's Resignation Honours List.

The loss of a by-election to anyone other than Reform UK, probably the Liberal Democrats, would render even more precarious the Leadership either of Kemi Badenoch or of Robert Jenrick, each of whom would only ever have been supported by one third of the MPs. Two such losses would render either of those Leaderships untenable. The Leader's strategy would have been shown to have been wrong all along. Indeed, even two losses to Reform would prove that that strategy had failed in its own terms. And one of each? Where to begin?

With all this to think about, the Right Honourable Members of His Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition have barely the time to mention that the problem is not Taylor Swift's Police escort, but the tickets that were exchanged for it, while the problem is not Starmer's affair with Jenny Chapman, or the resulting offspring, but his allocation of a Ministerial salary to her as a form of child support.

They cannot begin to address why Britain was meaninglessly sanctioning Iranians who had never had any intention of coming here, yet continuing to arm the Israelis even as they burned children alive in their refugee tents in the grounds of a Gaza hospital, and even as they bombed the Maronite, and therefore Catholic, village of Aitou (the ancestral home of 14,000 people in Peoria, Illinois) all the way up in the North Governate, thereby asserting their intention to annex, clear and colonise the whole of Lebanon, in which they had deployed, among other means of death, a chemical weapon against UN peacekeepers from Ireland, NATO and the Commonwealth.