Encore Outremer, Toujours Outremer

Ed West's Telegraph Blog today draws attention to Britain's responsibilities towards the dispossessed Christians of Iraq. Some below the line have suggested that the West create a state for Middle Eastern Christians. Well, several perfectly serviceable ones already exist, one way or another: Syria (for now), Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Iran.

Nevertheless, I propose that the last explicitly Christian states to have existed there be reconstituted as one big explicitly Christian state: the Kingdom of Jerusalem (which should be the name of the new state, with the Jerusalem Cross as the restored flag and so on), the Kingdom of Cilicia, the Principality of Antioch, the Principality of Galilee, the County of Edessa, the County of Jaffa and Ascalon, the County of Tripoli, the Lordship of Oultrejordan, and the Lordship of Sidon. All an awful lot more recent than any Kingdom of Israel or Kingdom of Judah. Long, long after those two had fallen, Jerusalem was for centuries an entirely Christian city.

The Head of the House of Habsburg still has the title King of Jerusalem, as recited at the recent funeral of the Archduke Otto. But perhaps the ideal monarch of a multiethnic though constitutionally Christian parliamentary democracy would be the person who already heads 16 sovereign states and numerous other territories thus organised, all in predominantly or entirely Christian countries but across a vast diversity of ethnicities in many parts of the world. Through the part-Moorish Elizabeth of York, she is even descended from Muhammad, making her a true focus of unity.

The first act of the Queen of Jerusalem, as such, should be to unveil, and to lay a wreath at, that which scandalously does not yet exist anywhere, namely a memorial to the British fallen during the Mandate of Palestine.