Crown Jewels

British republicans can always be silenced for at least four years by the election of an American Republican as President, so any outpouring of such sentiment in response to Saturday's Dispatches may be over by the end of this week. At any rate, that is true of the sort of republicans who make documentaries for Channel 4. The presence of Margaret Hodge made it obvious on what grounds the salonistes now felt that this subject could safely be broached. They may not know who would be President, but they know who no longer could be.

Or do they? The kind of Britons who warm to Donald Trump disagree with the present King about almost everything, so that Richard Tice repeatedly called for the then Queen to be succeeded by President Nigel Farage, Laurence Fox's Reclaim Party was avowedly republican throughout its brief period of relative relevance, and things like The Light are vitriolically hostile both to the monarchy and to the Royal Family. The institution ties Britain to the Commonwealth, while the dynasty has both very deep and very recent roots on the Continent.

What passes in a Richard Rogers building on Horseferry Road is therefore the least of the worries of the Duke of Lancaster and of the Duke of Cornwall. Successive Governments have wanted to privatise Channel 4, but in Nixon and China fashion, it would probably take a right-wing Labour one to pull it off. The Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall should buy the broadcaster of Dispatches. The House always wins, and the House in this case is that of Oldenburg, specifically of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

The Royal Duchies might make themselves useful across the board. Harland & Wolff used to be owned by the British State. It is poised to be bought by Navantia, which is the Spanish State. Britain will allow ownership by any state apart from our own. But if the Royal Duchies are private estates engaged in commerce, then what Thatcherite or Blairite could object to their purchase of, say, Thames Water? Thames Water's bonds are now classified as junk. How much could it possibly cost to buy a company like that? And so on. Either these acquisitions would work, or the outcry would be so loud that the real solution, renationalisation, would become unstoppable.

The Attlee Government missed a trick in not branding the nationalised industries "Royal", with crowns and royal cyphers all over them. It would have assumed that privatisation, a word that did not exist at the time, was inconceivable. In the end, not even the Crown and the Cypher saved the Royal Mail, but Margaret Thatcher had ruled out its privatisation, "because it's Royal." If so had everything else been, then on her own principles, she could not have privatised any of them. Better luck next time? Amend the next available piece of legislation to proclaim the Royal National Health Service.