Trucial State

Abused Dubaian princesses, Nicola Sturgeon's framing of Alex Salmond, the true status of Anne Sacoolas: it seems that you should have been listening to us cranks after all. Of course, the official media always knew these things. As with, for example, my many years of lonely exposition of the facts about Harriet Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange, they always knew. They just wouldn't say.

The Emir of Dubai's close ties to our own dear Royal Family raise once again the strange presentation of republicanism as beyond the fringe of British political opinion. In reality, it is consistently held by about 30 per cent of the population, and a party led by an avowed republican, the MP who had seconded Tony Benn's Commonwealth of Britain Bill, took 40 per cent of the vote in 2017.

One of the reasons why I am not a republican is that that position is the logic of Thatcherism. And William Hague, who was by far the cleverest Conservative Leader of the last 30 years, would have been unable to resist that logic in the way that more pedestrian minds were able to do. No one seriously doubts that he was a republican, and he had dropped broad enough hints in the past.

Moreover, he probably still is one, because, unlike Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, he never benefited personally from the fact that the monarchy conferred effectively absolute power on the Prime Minister, even to the point of just being able to send Parliament home and rule without it, all in the name of a Queen who was in fact busy swapping horses with the Emir of Dubai.

Britain remains a monarchy because that state of affairs keeps the people at the top of the Conservative Party monarchist, and they are rarely as clever as Hague (or Brown), because very few people in general ever are. But nothing else does. So nothing else does.