Going Dutch?

Do the Dutch bother with our Royal Family, considering that they have their own, which was also ours, whatever any Ladybird Guide may tell you, from 1689 to 1702? Our reigning House is no longer that of Windsor, either. It is something far more authentically blue-blooded.

At the other end of the Hull to Rotterdam ferry ride, the present King is another William of Orange, and he recalls yet a third of that name by reigning at the same time as Philip of Spain. There was ballyhoo about the Spanish translation of Prince Harry's book. But who read it?

And who is reading a Dutch translation of this Omid Scobie person's? Scobie's reliability may be deduced from his assertion that King Charles III invited Taylor Swift to perform at the Coronation, but she declined.

Joe Biden's sister, Valerie Biden Owens, has endorsed the former Meghan Markle's obvious ambition to become President of the United States, but it is little Lilibet, who was also born in the United States, who will be 55 in 2076. What a way to mark the Tricentenary, by electing a President whose first cousin was King George.

Still, while Piers Morgan's intervention has made it clear that, at least for now, the tabloid London where Scobie failed is having none of it, there is obviously a concerted campaign from Hollywood, which is more powerful than most of the world's states, to ensure that there never is a George VII, or even a William V.

Based on the nature of that campaign, the first Stadtholder of our United Provinces would have to be mixed-race. That will be an accurate enough reflection of the British population by the time of the King's death in, one expects, 15 to 20 years' time. But most mixed-race Britons will still be relatively young.

I, on the other hand, shall be in my early sixties, having been mixed-race since before it was fashionable. I stand by what I have written before, both about why, on balance, I would not want an elected Head of State, and about why I would be as qualified as anyone else for the position by the time that it became available. Start calling me Marshal of Lindsay, after those monarchist founding Presidents, Marshal de MacMahon and Marshal von Hindenburg.

And depend upon a better fate than befell either the Third Republic or the Weimar Republic, since unlike either de MacMahon or von Hindenburg, I am not minor nobility. As the founding Doge of the Most Serene Republic of Great Britain, I would inaugurate at least 11 centuries, to match those of the first Serenissima. Only then, at the earliest, would men they be, and must grieve when even the Shade of that which was once great was no more. Or whom would you have instead? President Scobie?