Reform?

You could have expensive therapy to go back to your Eighties childhood. Or you could just watch the darts. The fireworks. The ring girls, although that's boxing; what are they even called in darts? The utterly unselfconscious drinking. If they do not play Eye of the Tiger, then why not? They are hard lads in darts, though. Semi-final last night, final tonight. Only 24 hours to pack in all that gruelling training.

Elsewhere in nostalgia for the Dallas and Dynasty era, Andrew Bridgen turns out to have left the Reclaim Party because of a row with Laurence Fox over the use of a car, while today's edition of The World at One was the third time that Richard Tice had told the BBC that he wanted Nigel Farage to be President when Donald Trump was.

Fox is also a republican, as one must assume that so is his party. Like all republican politicians, he obviously wants to be President. All, that is, apart from Tice, who is the only politician ever to have wanted a republic so that a different named politician might become Head of State. Republicanism has always been the logic of Thatcherism, so this shift would probably have happened at this point. But the change of monarch has boosted it no end.

I have never understood why anyone expected the Royal Family to hold lower-middle-class, suburban opinions. Or even to affect them; Fox, Tice or Farage needs to do that, but the Royals have no such need. Anointing aside, although he changed the composition of his chrism, "Just Stop Oil" could be the King's motto. The Queen is probably one of those Lib Demy Tories, but it says a lot about both the King and the Greens that, complete with his personal homeopath, if the King had a vote, then he would be one of those Tories who now voted Green. 

In May, there turned out to be rather a lot of those. The Greens ended the night with 481 Councillors, far more than UKIP had ever had, and a net gain of 241, mostly from the Conservatives. Meanwhile, only six Reform candidates were elected, a net gain of two, of around 400 who had been fielded. UKIP lost all 25 of its remaining seats.

The great divide in officially existent opinion is between the people who agree with the King about everything except the monarchy, and the people who agree with the King about the monarchy but nothing else. The main exceptions are the BBC, the Armed Forces, the State Churches, and increasingly also the public schools. They agree with him about everything, as do the well-placed members of the Court Party, especially in the cultural and charitable sectors, that he has been cultivating assiduously for more than 20 years.

By the time of the King's death in, one expects, 15 to 20 years' time, I shall be in my early sixties. 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. 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, and why?