I’m afraid we are in Mandy Rice-Davis territory with Prince William’s denial that the Royal Family is racist – he would say that wouldn’t he? We live in a dysfunctional and mendacious society, not least at the top. Statements by public figures are almost invariably lies or at best economical with the actualité. Add to that the fact that racism is on a spectrum from casual and infrequent at one end to institutional at the other. Where the Royal Family is on that spectrum, and if it’s on it at all, isn’t a provable fact, it’s an opinion.

To wonder what skin colour the child of a mixed race marriage will be doesn’t strike me as racist per se. I’m sure the parents do it routinely. Though how that wonderment is expressed could surely be. The fact that the firm hasn’t come clean about Harry’s allegation strikes me as suspicious suggesting that the remark went further than just innocent speculation.

The Royal Family is elitist and has a long record of snobbery and personal dysfunctionality. Three of the Queen’s children have been divorced. The heir to the throne was a calculating and uncaring adulterer. His first wife was marginalised and treated in an inconsiderate way and her mental health suffered – thirty years on that pattern has repeated itself.

The scandal we are witnessing is one of almost incomprehensible bad manners and missed opportunity. In most families there is a challenge to welcome and embrace a new member – especially if they are different. Meghan is different in almost every way. The opportunity to turn those differences into positives was there to be grabbed. Not to find this intelligent and impressive and talented woman a proper Royal role is not just sub-optimum it was wounding to her.

And so I found that England is not Camelot at all. There are Knights alright and there is lots of dressing up. But the table is not round and most of the knights are kept well way from it. She sits at its head and there is no pretence of equality. “Looks like I need to know my place” I said to the Lady Fergie, my new best friend. “You better believe it” she replied with a scary smile.

“Did you learn to curtesy” Harry asked me early on. I viewed it on YouTube and the Lady May showed how. “You can’t bow too low” said Fergie, good for the back. “You may be a Duchess dear, but they’re ten a Penny. Better safe than sorry”.

Katherine was the model. I didn’t want to be her, God no, but I could learn from her. Smile a lot and grab a Prince’s hand. And bow of course. One day early on I asked her what she wanted out of life. “You mean apart from being Queen, and the mother of a King” she said. It sounds like a put down – it probably was.

Harry’s Dad is really a fictional character. “Is he for real?” I asked Harry. “Oh yes Megs “ he said “we quietly checked the DNA. My red hair’s a throwback – nothing to do with one of Mum’s suitors. Bit weird but that’s how it is.” Harry can’t stand him and it’s a stretch for him to be polite. The ‘stopped taking my calls’ wasn’t a joke.

If I was casting the soap opera I wouldn’t make the short list. Camilla (aka “Cruella”) is perfect in her role. Christopher Plummer auditioned for the consort role but Philip was just too perfect. And he had a British passport from somewhere. They’ve conveniently forgotten that, like me, he’s a foreigner. Meryl Streep offered to teach me to “Talk English”. – should I have done that?

So there we are. We are the villains and I’m about as popular as Wallis Simpson. My Duke’s in Santa Barbara not Paris but it’s more of the same. Wallis was the first Yankee in the Court. That didn’t go well. It’s not really looking that good for me either…

The Empire is a long time a-dying but its last vestige, the Commonwealth, is looking decidedly shaky. It is an organisation without power, or logic. Nations today are grouped by geography or common interest, often economic. The Commonwealth has neither. At best it is a talking shop, at worst an anachronism. The sad (for some) truth is that it doesn’t matter and never did.

It took us an unconscionable amount of time to stop being Imperial and remarkably we do still have a few colonies. But the Commonwealth is not colonial – though there is a strong element of nostalgic deference to the “Old Country” in it. It’s not venal, doesn’t damage the sovereignty of the member states – but it is irredeemably silly and pretentious.

When the Queen came to the throne the process of decolonisation had only just begun. She was never an Empress, but the sun never set on her subjects. Some seemed to like that and she remains Head of State in many. Quite why is hard to fathom. It’s daft enough for Britain to have an unelected Head of State but for countries to choose to have one who isn’t even a national is weird to say the least !

The Commonwealth countries choose their own heads of State and that some of them choose to have the British monarch (most don’t) is their business. A harmless eccentricity. The Commonwealth as a whole is the same. Some countries with no colonial past have joined the Commonwealth which makes the whole thing even odder, and arbitrary.

Can you name one thing the Commonwealth Conferences have actually achieved ? “Commonwealth Preference” is long since gone. The problem, of course, is that they have no power so their sentiments may be worthy and Jaw, Jaw is always preferable to War War but they can’t do anything.

Britain’s place in the world is in a state of flux – the “lost an Empire and not yet found a role” descriptor is more valid than it has ever been. The Commonwealth may remind us of our “Glorious Past” (not so glorious actually, but that’s another story). But clinging on to an ersatz Empire just makes us look self-important and silly. Time a line was drawn under this nonsense.

Rachel Sylvester has a piece in The Times today arguing for the replacement of Priti Patel by Michael Gove as Home Secretary. Yes of course Patel needs to be replaced and yes there is a case to be made that she is the worst of a truly awful Cabinet. The most illiberal Home Secretary in living memory is also incompetent and very nasty. But if competence was the main criterion of judgment none of her gruesome colleagues should stay in office either.

The crunch is that Conservative politics has become an extreme form of Margaret Thatcher’s “Is he one of us?”. The only essential characteristic is to be loyal to the Great Leader and, of course, to the destructive nationalism of Johnson’s politics. The appointment to the Cabinet of the revolting Lord Frost was perhaps the ultimate expression of this.

I was once invited to an event at which Michael Gove was the main speaker. I asked an acquaintance who knew him well what he was like and was told he was good-mannered and polite. His address was pretty shabby with gaping holes in its logic. I asked Gove about these deficiencies and he turned on me with venom. I had, I think, been courteous. Gove certainly was not.

The point of replacing Patel with Gove is not that it would be marginally preferable (it probably would) but that the core of her policies would not change. Xenophobia is at the heart of this and it stands in the way of Britain’s European trade dilemma. The case for being a member of the Single Market and the Customs Union is overwhelming but the EU would require that we sign up again to the Four Freedoms to do this. Patel wouldn’t do this and I doubt that Gove would either.

If substance and style and intellect really mattered who in Boris’s band of brothers and sisters would survive? Sunak perhaps but Williamson, Hancock, Truss – no way. The blessed Margaret, to her credit, did tolerate dissidents in her cabinet. Johnson does not. Not one of his motley and sub-standard crew stands up to him or even mildly hints at his manifest inadequacies.

So if Patel is kicked out it will be fine to have a quiet cheer. And Gove would be a superficial improvement. But the event would only be a minor wobble to Johnson’s hegemony. A Pyrrhic victory.

I am in favour of the census and like many, I’m sure, have used previous census records in researching my family history. But I very much doubt that today major political decisions are made using census information.

We live in a data rich society. We don’t need a census to tell us about the gross inequalities in Britain and yet our politicians have consistently failed to do anything about it. Did you know that there is a high correlation between wealth and COVID ? The richest postcodes have the fewest number of cases. The poorest the highest. It’s not a secret, but have you heard a government Minister mention it let alone propose to do anything about it?

Then there’s education, where there is a clear North/South divide. The postcodes with the more expensive homes (mainly in the South of England) are also the ones with the better performing schools and pupils. Are you aware of a levelling up policy that seeks to change this?

Virtually every demographic reveals that there are two Britains just as much as there were in Disraeli’s day. ‘Twas ever thus you might say but does it have to be? Consumer research is highly sophisticated in our digital age – there need be very little we don’t know or can’t find out. But data collection is one thing, taking action is another.

Our nation has a collective obsession with secrecy. The preposterous but successful campaign against ID Cards was driven by absurd notions of privacy. We accept the need for a driving licence but try and expand that a tad into an ID Card and the faux-libertarians take to the streets.

So I will willingly fill in my Census form and have no secrets to withhold. But will there be any actual action based on analysis of census data that will make my life better? I’m not holding my breath.

If there was a logical solution to the “Northern Ireland problem” even successively and increasingly dysfunctional Conservative governments would surely have grasped it. There is a logical long term solution actually, but the consequences are unthinkable. That solution is a United Ireland.

It’s unthinkable because a significant proportion of the population of Northern Ireland think that they are British. That thought is driven not by some genuine patriotism but by the rawest “loyalist” sectarianism. Even if the majority in the province put their Irishness ahead of their Britishness (they may now do this) the Unionist minority is in no mood to compromise.

The Conservative Party has always been unionist and many of its members were unenthusiastic about the Good Friday Agreement. Some of them are close to the current Government. The reunification of Ireland will happen one day, but not under the current Government’s watch.

So there has to be compromise as there was in the GFA. But the unique cross border enlightenment which astonishingly, and admirably, had Gerry Adams in a coalition with Ian Paisley Snr cannot survive the Brexit we now have. When Britain and Ireland were together fellow members of the EU, and therefore the Single Market, all was well. But now that binding is absent.

Brexit, as negotiated, is binary in everything – not least in the island of Ireland. There is no grey area that can work. Not when the Orangemen gear up their provocative marches (or worse) there isn’t.

Britain is already suffering from its withdrawal from the Single Market and the Customs Union and aside from Ireland there are sound pragmatic reasons for a rethink. If the need for a credible solution to the NI problem is to rejoin the Single Market and the Customs Union there would be no downsides, other than a bit of loss of face by the hard core Brexiteers. It was always likely that a Norway or a Switzerland outcome would emerge.

President Biden could be the key along with our friends in Europe – we do still have some. Washington could, along with Brussels, broker an arrangement that would be WIN/WIN for Orange and Green as well as Red, White and Blue.

There was an article of such mendacious delusion by James Forsyth in The Times yesterday that one wonders whether it was drafted in Tufton Street* – it almost certainly was. The facts are very different. Abandoning Freedom of Movement from and to Continental Europe is overwhelmingly negative for Britain.

Twenty-seven sovereign members of the European Union, and two or three others which also benefit from Freedom of Movement, look across the 30 kilometres of water that physically divide us and see again evidence that we’ve taken leave of our senses.

Established working relationships for Brits in continental Europe and for Europeans from these countries here have been shattered by Brexit and by the policies which have been implemented to enforce its xenophobic absurdities.

Forsyth argues that opening our doors to those freeing repression in Hong Kong shows that our immigration policy is now “liberal”. Preposterous nonsense. In the main Hong Kongers worried about the increasing restrictions on their freedoms will look not to perfidious Albion, the once colonial master who let them down, but to welcoming countries like Canada and Australia. The Chinese communities of Vancouver or Melbourne are familiar and offer infinitely better cultural, family and employment options than Little England.

There is ample research to show unequivocally that Brexit was won on the platform of anti immigration prejudice and xenophobia – especially anti Muslim. Lies were told about the threat of Turkish immigration, for example, which hugely helped the Faragist anti Islam cause. It is no exaggeration at all to say that one of the decisive factors in the “Leave” vote was the sexual crimes of Muslims in Rotherham – something with no Europe connection at all.

The mutually beneficial freedom of movement between Britain and our then fellow members of the EU had no downsides at all. At every level – from surgeons to fruit pickers – it worked. And the other way of course. A new generation of young Brits is being denied the opportunities their elder siblings and parents had to travel freely, live and work in thirty European countries. What an utterly bigoted and foolish country we have become.

* Tufton Street (or roads nearby) is the home of nine hard Right “think tanks”. Most have strong links to the Conservative Right. All are pro Brexit and variously anti-immigration and “libertarian”. They are:

• The Adam Smith Institute
• Brexit Central
• The Centre for Policy Studies
• Civitas
• The Global Warming Policy Foundation
• The Institute for Economic Affairs
• Leave means Leave
• The Office of Peter Whittle (The New Culture Forum)
• The Tax Payers’ Alliance

Magnificent achievement. The Chancellor of the Exchequer manages in his Budget statement not to mention Brexit once. And yet whilst the virus is certainly an economically lethal shortish term hit on the economy Brexit is a growing and disastrous very long term malignancy. And probably an incurable one.

There is no aspect of our economic and financial health that the cancer of Brexit isn’t eating away at. Manufacturing, financial services, hospitality, the Arts – virtually every sector is taking a hit. The physical necessities of moving goods into and out of the U.K. is hampered by bureaucracy and regulation replacing free movement. The recruitment of people at all levels from surgeons to fruit pickers is frustrated by immigration rules uniquely restrictive.

Financial Services, once a jewel in our crown, is taking a huge hit as companies move to less restrictive and more welcoming locations. Amsterdam has already overtaken London in some areas, other cities will follow. In modern times there is no precedent for the isolation that Brexit creates. “Global Britain” is the antithesis of the reality.

A modern economy to be successful has to be open and flexible. Adam Smith centuries ago helped us understand the workings of Land, Labour, Capital and Enterprise. Economic groupings, of which the EU is by far the most important and successful, free up the factors of production and optimise them across borders. The Single Market and the Customs Union backed by the four freedoms unquestionably did that. Britain walked away and we can already see the costs of that foolishness.

Like many malignancies only a radical intervention will make a difference. But a Government that doesn’t even mention Brexit in its annual budget is unlikely to have any plans to ameliorate its effects. Only deep-seated prejudice could have forced Britain voluntarily into a situation where we have abandoned the single market – serious European economies, like Switzerland, have not done that despite being outside the EU.

Britain “contra mundom” will be a sad place. The delusion that being outside the EU improves our prospects with the rest of the world is offensive in its mendacity. The nonsense of the “Anglosphere” rumbles on in some quarters but being an island alone hardly improves our bargaining power and the old Dominions aren’t exactly queuing up to help.

Britain will need to restructure its economy to cope with Brexit – that means cope with it being smaller. A smaller economy means one with reduced taxation and reduced public services. You can’t run a world class health service or education system on hot air. When interest rates start to creep up again, as they will, deficit financing will become less attractive. Lower taxes and increased borrowing costs are a long term consequence of Brexit.

Government statements are often more revealing for what they don’t say than what they do. Rishi Sunak is a Basil Fawlty Chancellor – “Don’t mention Brexit” is his “Don’t mention the War”. He won’t get away with it for long surely ?

You cannot isolate taxation from a discussion of spending and, especially, borrowing. In modern history there has never been a time when Government borrowing has been so cheap. True borrowing increases debt but if servicing debt costs virtually nothing then expanding deficit financing is responsible.

The National finances are not comparable with those of a household – or a business for that matter. Restricting the money supply when interest rates were high had its merits. But when rates are close to zero the monetarist case fails.

Increasing tax in a time of unprecedented economic threat – the double whammy of COVID and Brexit – throws petrol on the fire of economic uncertainty. At a simple level taxation is a limiting factor on expenditure and therefore on recovery. Growth is created by consumption and that is restrained by higher taxes.

Over the long term balanced budgets are a reasonable goal. But as in the 1930s spending an economy’s way out of recession in the medium term would work – and today at modest servicing cost. A major public expenditure initiative on healthcare facilities, transport, education and infrastructure is a better option than increased taxation. Time for Keynes not Thatcher.

I am the same age as Benjamin Braddock. Remember him? He was the graduate in “The Graduate” the superlative coming of age movie of the 1960s directed by Mike Nichols from Charles Webb’s novel of the same name. And starring, of course, Dustin Hoffman in his first major film role.

To be 21 in 1967 , the year of the film’s release, was – to coin a phrase – very heaven. But Ben Braddock and I were in rather different worlds. He was in Southern California and I was in Ealing. Ben had completed his studies and I was just starting mine. And, unlike me, Ben had a Mrs Robinson.

We, that’s Ben and me, were the lucky generation, albeit on different sides of the Atlantic. He had an Alfa Romeo and I had a Fiat 500. Italian chic and a car which resembled a metal hen house on wheels. But we were both mobile and what if his wheels were a bit classier than mine?

Those undergraduate days were characterised by stimulating studies and roaring hormones. The sixties did swing in London (of course) as well as Santa Barbara. And Paul Simon reached out to us all

“Got no deeds to do, no promises to keep
I’m dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep
Let the morning time drop all its petals on me
Life, I love you, all is groovy”

And there was plenty that was “groovy” even in Ealing. You see our generation was ready for something if we didn’t move too fast and made the morning last. But in the US something that was moving fast was troop deployment in Vietnam – almost half a million, and rising, in 1967. That war didn’t feature in “The Graduate” but even this side of the pond we could see that more dangerous to Ben Braddock, even than Mrs Robinson, was the possibility of being drafted.

In 1966 Simon and Garfunkel had signalled the dangers of escalation in Vietnam in their extraordinary “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” song on their “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme” album. The choice of the duo to do “The Graduate” sound track helped place the film subtly in the protest movement genre. Ben Braddock’s protest was understated and subtle and personal and his rebellion was against social convention rather than being anti war. But under the surface – not least at Elaine’s university Berkeley where “The Times They Were a-Changin” as Bob Dylan had signalled they would back in 1964.

Ealing College was not Berkeley but we did our bit. It wasn’t a bad time to be on the cusp of adulthood and to have the self-confidence to tell our Parents’ generation that they were messing things up. 1967 was , of course, “The Summer of Love” and that for me was marked by the Beatles “All you need is love” which had just been released when I took a student holiday by train to Athens. It must have been played a hundred times as we made our way rather slowly (two days) from Boulogne to the Greek capital.

“The Graduate” was a story in which one young man and, eventually, one beautiful young woman took charge of their own lives. Me too in a more understated way. I didn’t have an Alfa Romeo (😢) or a Mrs Robinson (😢😢) . But in 1968 I was to find my own Elaine in Ann – no less beautiful than the gorgeous Katherine Ross !

Fifty years on “The Graduate” has lost none of its power. Hoffman, Ross and the extraordinary Anne Bancroft created a story that was so much more than light comedy, at least for my generation. It was the coming of age film of my generation because it overtly said “Your time has come”. It had.