Sorry America, we aren’t a racist state...

UP UNTIL now we always imagined the Americans were pretty keen on the Queen and the British monarchy and that they half imagined we live in a sort of Merrie England where people doff caps and Cockneys talk like Dickvan Dyke in Mary Poppins.

They may even have been a little envious of the way we do things here. Consider, for instance, the last “seamless” handover of power in Washington last year when a baying mob of nutters in fancy dress stormed the Capitol. As the great American lawyer Clarence Darrow once said: “When I was a boy I was told anybody could become President. I’m beginning to believe it.”

But no longer. It turns out Americans despise the Queen. Or at least the Newyorktimes – the most boring newspaper in the world – does. A couple of hours after her death, when even the Kremlin had a good word to say about her, the “progressive” New Yorktimes published an article with the baffling headline “Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire”.

I mean, that’s what we are doing, isn’t it? I don’t recall anyone saying “shame about the Empire”.

The piece by Harvard academic Maya Jasanoff proceeded in its finger-wagging way to tell us that we should not “romanticise” the era of this colonising Cruella devil. Puzzling, as our dear Queen made it her business to decolonise, embrace the Commonwealth and shrug off Empire.

This was her great achievement. But all this is par for the course in the Newyorktimes which never tires of giving Britain a good kicking. “You can’t get in or out of the country because of airline staff shortages and queues at border control,” it falsely claimed last week as if no other countries had had problems after the pandemic.

In 2018 a NYT restaurant reviewer grudgingly admitted the food in London had improved from a time of “porridge and boiled mutton”. It’s clear that this fool imagined a London of swirling fogs and villains in top hats and gaiters. Now they’re inviting us to storm the barricades because the Queen’s funeral will be paid for with taxpayers’ money. Do they seriously think this is either a) news or b) surprising? It’s a state funeral

guys.the clue’s in the title.