Vivat

The King was divorced from his first wife, so she would probably not have attended his Coronation, and she would certainly not have been crowned. The Queen is the most successful British politician alive, and the most successful in living memory. No one else comes close.

The arrest of protestors indicates that the monarchy does not in fact embody the things that its supporters say that it does. But its opponents are saying that those arrests are reminiscent of certain other countries, and those countries are republics. The arguments on both sides are rubbish, and the monarchy is what we have.

The country being cited most as the kind of place where demonstrators were bundled into the backs of police vans is Russia, and not without cause, although the same is just as true of Ukraine. Whoever fired whatever was fired at the Kremlin, this is not our fight. Beyond humanitarian relief, we are suicidally wrong to be playing any part in it, much less supplying one side with a weapon of mass destruction. What if our depleted uranium were to be fired at the Kremlin?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now broadly right about foreign policy, or at least better than any available alternative, but he was up to his neck in the Russiagate hoax. He may be the best this time, and able to open up the debate even though he will never be the nominee, but there is something pathetic, in both senses of the word, about those who are cheerleading for him out of dynastic loyalty while denouncing or deriding the monarchy and the Coronation.

Russia was one of a handful of countries with which British relations were so bad that they were not invited to send representation to the Coronation. Another was Afghanistan. What a successful 20-year war that was. All five British Prime Ministers who had waged it were in attendance, along with numerous others who had done so. Think on.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.