The main point is the contrast between the respect we are supposed hold for these people (the Royals) and the reality that they are a dysfunctional bunch of pompous, privileged prats.

The moral improprieties reach their apogee in Andrew Windsor but from the King and his consort downwards they are an unappealing family. There is a “droit de seigneur” imperative which means that virtually all the male members have had liaisons galore. 

The whole edifice is preposterously phoney. The presumption that accident of birth should give one power, respect, money and and rights is repellent. And they parade their privileges in a way that is medieval. And to say that the Emperor and his crew have no clothes (which is often true) is challenged by the shameless royalists amongst us who kowtow and genuflect at every contrived opportunity. 

We only have ourselves to blame. Andrew gave good service in the Falklands but later in his twenty year naval career his deficiencies meant that his earned promotions were few. So his mother made him a Rear Admiral! It would be comical if it was not so offensive. 

It’s a while since we beheaded a King and I’m not suggesting we do so now. But surely at last the pantomime is over?

The analogy between the Profumo affair and the Andrew scandal (today’s Times) is weak. John Profumo was a highly regarded Minister with an admirable record of service. A future Prime Minister held in high regard. His brief fling with Keeler was out of character and silly rather than serious. But the times were a-changing. Satire had been born and the baby boomer generation, of which I was part, had the courage to laugh at its elders. Macmillan was the first Prime Minister to be portrayed on the stage (by Peter Cook in “Beyond the Fringe” ) and Private Eye had been launched. 

Macmillan was a decent and able man, but a Victorian in a modern age. His own wife Dorothy was unfaithful but it didn’t greatly worry him and he ignored it. Before Profumo he was feeling low and contemplating standing down. The scandal might have accelerated the process but it wasn’t its primary cause.

Andrew Lownie’s biography of Andrew and his wife reveals a man who couldn’t hold a candle to Profumo. His admirable service in The Falklands aside Andrew is revealed as a dysfunctional serial adulterer and a pompous snob full of self-regard. The encounters with Virginia Roberts and the links with Epstein were far from exceptional lapses of morals and good taste. Profumo’s liaisons with Christine Keeler, by comparison, were in truth pretty harmless. 

You only have to look at the maps of Israel in 1948 and Israel today to see that the Zionists have won every battle and that Lebensraum has been militarily achieved. (I use these highlighted words not as abuse but as accurate terminology). Hamas did not exist before 1987 – there was 40 years of Arab/Israeli conflict before that.

That Israel has always had settlement ambitions way beyond its original borders is not in dispute. And nor is the fact that the victims of these ambitions are mainly the Palestinian people. To the victors have gone the spoils, as they always do. Let’s be clear. It’s not just Hamas that has been defeated but the people of Palestine. Thousands of them dead, their homes destroyed, their future obliterated.

In 1945 the Allied nations who destroyed Hitler and Hirohito said “never again” and lead the reconstruction. The Soviet Union did it differently from the United States and Britain, but it happened. At the end of the war Hamburg and Dresden, Tokyo and Hiroshima looked very like Gaza does now. Does Israel want, would it permit, the reconstruction of Gaza as a Palestinian state? What do you think?

The Hamas terrorism of October 7th was Israel’s casus belli for destroying not (just) an armed enemy but also a nascent state that it doesn’t want as a neighbour. In short whilst Hamas presumably knows that it has been defeated  there are over five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who are understandably concerned that Israel holds their future in their hands.

This is broadly true as well as being funny! A definitive test is to see which European countries export their cuisines in Restaurants. You find Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Greek restaurants all around the world. You won’t find an English or a German one anywhere! You can eat well in Amsterdam, but it will be Indonesian not Dutch cuisine.

There are distinctive dishes above the line – The herrings in The Netherlands and Scandinavia for example. And you can eat well in Michelin starred restaurants in Hamburg or Copenhagen. But the cuisine will be international not local.

The division applies to beverages as well. The orange countries produce and drink wine, the green beer and spirits. Wine accompanies good food – beer a pretzel or a bowl of peanuts.

The other difference is choice. There are twenty or more distinctive Italian cuisines. Spain has wide range of regional variations as of course does France. In Britain the food as well as being undistinguished is ubiquitous- the fish and chips is the same everywhere.

Bon Appétit !

Iain Dale’s adoration for Margaret Thatcher in these books (above) takes him into a world where his normal political nous is buried by cultish hero worship. Mind you he’s not alone in this. How often do we hear the preposterous and ignorant claim that she was “the best thing that happened to this country” . It’s balderdash.

Thatcher got lucky in 1982 with the Falklands War without which she would be a footnote in history. Rightly. I say this not as an opponent of the decline of deep mining nor as a defender of excessive Trades Union power. No, I criticise the mindless and uncaring way she approached these necessary changes. 

And remember she was opposed by her last Cabinet over Europe. The faux-patriotism she union-flagged post Falklands turned her into a grotesque Little Englander when out of office. She sowed the seeds of first intellectually bereft Euroscepticism and then the Referendum “Leave” campaign. In no small measure Brexit is attributable to Thatcher.

It’s forgotten that Thatcher was influenced strongly by her Home Counties golf club bore of a husband. Denis was a middle class, well off bigot from central casting. When his wife called Nelson Mandela a “terrorist” that was Denis speak.

After Thatcher her successor John Major cleverly unraveled his inheritance from her , where he could. But the disastrous privatisations she did were too much for him or even Blair/Brown to undue. Our filthy beaches, polluted rivers and chaotic railways are directly Thatcher’s legacy. Our gas and electricity services rewarding investors and Directors rather than serving customers are more of the same. As is our lone man of Europe isolation which makes us an outlier on the international stage.

Thatcher was no feminist either. Her politics had more Testosterone in them than Estrogen ! There were few female Ministers in her Governments and she did little for women’s Rights.

It is a political Age without heroes, an Age which started with Brexit which, as I say, has strong causal links to Thatcher. The irony is that people like Iain Dale, whilst acknowledging today’s lack of politicians of substance, look at Thatcher as a golden Age by comparison. The truth is that the Blessed Margaret was the original cause of our problems!

Coherent critique” – you have to be joking ! It was an offensive ramble by a man for whom diplomacy means screaming abuse. He involved himself in his rant in matters about which he has no right to comment (the governance of London for example) and in matters like climate change about which he has neither the knowledge nor the intellect to speak.

His whole life and persona is a historical aberration. Near 80 years without a scintilla of moral underpinning and full of excess. Once seen as a New York liberal (really!) he has morphed into a clueless parody of a real politician. And yet we do have to take him seriously – there’s a nuclear button on his desk.

Students of American history will describe how the Presidents can be ranked from “Great” through”Good” to “Bad” – but never before has their been downright “Ugly” nor a felon in the White House. 

Trump should not have been lavishly welcomed to Britain, and our Prime Minister should not have kowtowed to him. But the moment when the King visibly sniggered at one of Trump’s inanities in his speech was to be treasured. Charles can spot a fraudulent fool when he meets one – he’s had a few in his own family. 

Having lived in the Middle East for six years and travelled widely in the Region I think that the routine description of Israel being the only democracy there is overdone. Yes Israelis vote and (say) Emiratis do not. But, frankly, I’d rather live in Dubai than Tel Aviv! 

The progress made by Israel over nearly eighty years to expand their borders lies four square behind Netanyahu’s ambition to create Greater Israel. This is pure Lebensraum. Along the way some Arab states made grievous errors with military assaults on the fledgling Israeli state. And Arab terrorist movements like Hamas and Hezbollah have done the same. But over the years, and especially recently, Israel’s response has been disproportionate.

The Iran/Iraq war, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Human Rights abusing states like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and many other instances of institutionalised terror show that it is wrong to characterise the region in a binary way – “Arabs good, Israelis bad” (and vice versa) is unhelpful. But when push comes to shove the Arabs (and the Persians) will oppose Israel (sometimes collectively). 

In this continued tinder box situation Israel’s expansionism feeds the fire. They may by force acquire Gaza and settle there, as they have done elsewhere. But does anyone seriously think that will contribute positively to the resolution of conflict? Rather the reverse surely ? 

Tobias Elwood in The Times today has contributed a very good piece, and I say that as someone who has never voted Conservative in my life! I particularly like the call for consensus. Margaret Thatcher was the first mould-breaking party leader of my lifetime. Attlee created the Welfare State but it was World War 2 that spurred that. Attlee’s reforms were largely unchanged by governments of either Party. Until Thatcher came along. She did some good, some bad and some downright ugly things. But Major, Blair and Brown restored the centrist norm and a fair degree of consensus.

So what’s gone wrong – in one word it was Brexit. Cameron was a consensus politician – he even formed the first peacetime coalition of modern times. The Referendum screwed him, and then the country. We haven’t been polite to one another since !

The decline of the Tories was directly attributable to the “Leavers” in the Party and then to the grotesque Hard Brexit which, astonishingly, leaves us as the only country in Europe with no formal economic, commercial or social alliances. Except for Belarus. Strange company.

The Conservatives have morphed into “National Conservatives” , and they’re not very good at it. Reform has seen the nationalist drift on the Right and captured it. There’s probably only room for one “Hard Right” Party and Mr Farage’s “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly”. have taken over. 

There are some decent One Nation Conservatives still around but they are leaderless, unrepresentated in Parliament, and rare as red squirrels.

“Yet in Britain we still have — and must hang on to — vital attributes of which America seems to have lost sight: courts that are not politicised, media that entertains more than one point of view, public servants who are impartial, electoral boundaries that are not gerrymandered, politicians who consider their opponents wrong but not criminal, and voters whose readiness to switch between parties shows they are searching more for competence than ideology.” William Hague. The Times.

Indeed, Hague is right. We are divided from America by a common language and a whole lot more. That common language can sometimes fool us into believing we are culturally the same. Far from it. It certainly helps the British traveller in the States – I can engage with a bauxite miner in Nevada (which I once did) rather more easily than I can with one in Brazil ! But it’s not just casual acquaintances. I worked with Shell colleagues in Houston who were superficially like me. But deep down they were utterly different. Verbally we could communicate well (with a little effort on my part). But culturally we were polls apart.

The arrival of Trump has widened the gap. We have had our Bozo politicians (Liz Truss anyone?). But we survive. Trump is, of course, an aberration, especially in his ghastly second term. We’ve not had anything like him. Dei gratia. It’s when politics become a cult that you have to worry. In Britain it happened to an extent with Margaret Thatcher, but we found a way to get rid of her when she went mentally AWOL. Can the US do the same with Trump ? We’ll see.

As English becomes the Lingua Franca of Europe it makes communication differences with we monolingual Brits irrelevant. The educated young Dutchman or Dane is as comfortable in English as he is in his mother tongue. And believe me we have more in common with most Europeans than we do with most Americans.

We made the wrong choice in 2016. Our future is indisputably in Europe not as some distant territory of the United States (which is how Trump sees us). We need to put that right.

Do I still like to be in America? Not under Trump I don’t.

Gangster in chief Al Capone eventually went to jail for tax evasion not murder. They got him in the end. The analogy is far from precise but I have a feeling that “they” (whoever “they” is ) might get Keir Starmer for the Mandelson error not for failed governance.

Now let be clear Starmer’s mistakes are individually not particularly venal, but collectively the perception is that they add up to a Prime Minister not on top of his job. And these perceptions become reality because, rightly or wrongly, people perceive them to be true.

The Mandelson scandal (and scandal it is) revealed a culpable lack of judgment on Starmer’s part. When I heard of the appointment I immediately could see a very deep elephant trap opening up, and unavoidable. Mandy has previous (ask Tony Blair) and this and his linkage to Jeffrey Epstein, greatest villain of our times, should instantly have precluded his appointment.

That Mandelson qua ability could do the job is probably true, but not the point. We’re back to perceptions again. When Emily Maitlis did her forensic demolition of Prince Andrew the dodgy links to Epstein were enough to destroy him. Andrew was too thick to see this. Mandelson is far from thick which is why he should have turned Starmer’s job offer down. Did his ego override his judgement? It certainly looks that way. Both Starmer’s offer and Mandelson’s acceptance exhibited dreadful judgment.

Politics is always the Art of the Possible. Starmer is on very shaky ground at the moment. Many in his own party are uncomfortable with what they see as the Prime Minister reacting to the apparent rise of Reform by aping them. If the Labour Party is a “Moral crusade or it is nothing” I’m afraid that Starmer’s lurch to the Right means it is nothing.

The appalling record of failure of Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and (to a lesser extent) Sunak should have shown Starmer what to do and, more importantly, what not to do. We cried out for honesty and competence to replace 14 years of mendacity and screwing things up. Starmer is more honest than this bunch of shifty folk but in truth he doesn’t seem to get things right any better.

What next ? I don’t know. Even competent European leaders like Emanuel Macron are struggling, America is in thrall to someone who I can only call an idiot. As in the 1920s and 1930s Italy and Germany the Hard Right is seeking and winning public appeal. Batten down the hatches, there’s a rough ride ahead.