Flagging

Blissfully ignorant of life along the Red Wall, Keir Starmer and his entourage really do imagine that all that we might want or need would be the sight of a few flags.

Flag-waving, which was previously considered rather a foreign practice, rose in popularity from the 1990 World Cup onwards in relation to the England football team, so that the flag preferred by Starmer is not much waved even now.

The fondness for displaying the Union Flag has always been one of the things that made people in Great Britain view Unionism in Northern Ireland as only a naive and overeager impersonation of British identity.

And of course Starmer is a republican in principle. All Labour Leaders since 1980 have been republicans in principle. Before that, they were like almost all Conservative Leaders ever, to whom the monarchy has kept sweet the people who needed to be kept sweet while investing the Prime Minister with what amounted to absolute power.

John Major and Theresa May were perhaps partial exceptions, in that they probably were and are sentimental royalists in theory. But they behaved like all the others in practice.