Greatness of The Motherland in Your Glorious Deeds?

The people who claimed that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq are now demanding a nuclear war to avenge the death of a man who is still alive. At least Alexander Litvinenko was dead, even though he should never have been allowed to bring his very heavy baggage to our door in the first place.

If, and the Police are openly laughing it out, there have indeed been a further 14 "Russian-related" murders on our soil, and if nine of those have indeed been the murders of Boris Berezovsky and his associates, then why did we ever give houseroom to Berezovsky? He was as unattractive as Litvinenko, who was as unattractive as Sergei Skripal. Skripal was not with the FSB, as the spooky Daily Telegraph is claiming. He was with the GRU.

The GRU once ran MI5, and perhaps it still does, which would explain the warm welcome that is given to its traitors by MI6. But the key point is that the GRU is an integral part of the Russian Armed Forces, not as a cover story, but as an open part of the structure. Therefore, and long after the fall of the Soviet Union, Colonel Skripal betrayed his brother officers and his men.

He has not exactly lived a quiet life since, so it would hardly be surprising if eventually some of those officers and men had decided to pay him a call. His sentence in supposedly backward Russia would have been lenient for the same offences here, and unthinkably so in the United States. But he did not even serve the whole of that.

Why did he do it? For the money, or because he was being blackmailed, or because of some personal grudge. There would have been, and there sometimes was, a traceable logic to a conversion from the official founding ideals and the leading global role of the Soviet Union to the official founding ideals and the leading global role of the American Republic.

But there is no conceivable reason of principle why, with potentially fatal consequences for himself and other people, and not simply because he had married here and decided to stay or what have you, a Russian living in Russia would transfer his allegiance from the post-Soviet Russian Federation to a state which, as such, had no fundamental principle beyond the Protestant Succession to its Throne.

A Succession and a Throne, moreover, which have no implications whatever for the substantial content of public policy, whether at home or abroad. I support the monarchy because it keeps sweet a lot of people who need to be kept sweet, but I am a loss as to why it has that effect on them.

For all her undoubted personal piety, I am utterly baffled by the cult of the present Queen among Evangelical Protestants and among those who cleave to a more-or-less 1950s vision of Anglicanism, Presbyterianism or Methodism. What has either the monarchy or the Queen ever done for them?

Either the Queen or her equally revered father signed off on every nationalisation, every aspect of the Welfare State, every retreat from Empire, every social liberalisation, every loosening of Commonwealth ties, every constitutional change, every EU treaty, and even every alteration to the doctrine, discipline and liturgy of the Church of England. If they could not have done otherwise, then why bother having a monarchy at all? What is it for?

During the present reign, Britain has become history's most secular country, and the White British have become history's most secular ethnic group, a trend that has been even more marked among those with Protestant backgrounds than it has been among Catholics.

Is it the job of a monarch, if not to acquire territory and subjects, then at least to hold them? If so, then George VI was by far the worst ever British monarch, and quite possibly the worst monarch that the world has ever seen. And is it the job of a British monarch to maintain a Protestant society and culture in the United Kingdom? If so, then no predecessor has ever begun to approach the abject failure of Elizabeth II, a failure so complete that no successor will ever be able to equal it.

The culture that produced the DUP never did resemble the Protestant mainstream anywhere else, and until very recently it was not the Protestant mainstream even in Northern Ireland, if it is now. But the prominence of the DUP does illustrate most starkly just how alien anything like that now is to the rest of the United Kingdom.

20 years on, there are those who would revisit the Good Friday Agreement, which the Queen strongly endorsed at the time, as a "surrender to the IRA". They miss the point that, even if not quite so phrased, that was exactly what enough people in Northern Ireland wanted by then, and what the huge majority of people in Great Britain had always wanted.

When it looked as if the No vote was going to be larger than it turned out to be, then there were demands for the Kingdom-wide referendum that would have delivered a colossal, entirely knowing majority for that surrender.

If the referendum had gone the other way, then the patience of the Mainland's politicians and public would finally have snapped, and Northern Ireland would have been a distant memory by now, regardless of what anyone living on that territory might have thought.

Everyone knew what was in the Good Friday Agreement. And that was precisely why, apart from the DUP and a few ultras on the right-wing London papers, everyone wanted it. Everyone, including the Queen.

Like the hereditary peerage, the monarchy is no more a bulwark against anything than the European Union has ever been a bulwark against Thatcherism. The economic damage of the last 40 years will only begin to be reversed once we are free of the EU's State Aid rules, a freedom that is advocated by Jeremy Corbyn but not by Theresa May.

Similarly, paleoconservative opinion can only hope to represented once the powers of the House of Lords have been transferred to a new second chamber to which each of the 99 lieutenancy areas elected six Senators, with each of us voting for one candidate and with the top six elected at the end, and once the exercise of each of the Royal Prerogatives has been transferred to six, seven, eight or nine of nine nationally elected Co-Presidents, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the top nine elected at the end.

You know what you have to do, brothers and sisters. You know what you have to do.