I won’t raise a cup of warm wine to this posh pensioner

IN A Tesco Express, wandering lonely as a cloud, the paper plates hit me. The Union Flag (not Jack) is on everything, from mugs to maxi-dresses. But no, I shall not be filling some paper cup full of warm wine to toast the unelected head of state any time soon.

Call me sour, call me bitter, call me ungrateful – it’s nothing new. The loneliness of being a long-distance republican inures me. It’s no longer 1977, I realise, and we are one nation under the Tory groove. Or grind.

The Queen? She works hard for her money. She is the acceptable face of hereditary privilege to which everyone, even the BBC, becomes obsequious. We walk backwards in her company. The republican cause waxes and wanes and is way too respectful. To say: ‘I would like to live as a citizen in a functioning democracy rather than as a subject of some random posh pensioner’ is insulting, apparently.

Too much of my life has been spent in meetings about constitutional reform. The Monarchy, the House of Lords, the accident of birth that ensures power at a time of zilch social mobility ought to be meaty stuff, but is dry in its dusty rationality.

Monarchy works through infantilised emotion: Oh look here is the Queen! In yellow! In a hat! Here is Prince Philip being charmingly racist! Doesn’t it make your heart burst?

Mrs Windsor, as Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood calls her, works hard . . . at least in the Royal world, where working two or three days a week is unusual.

The massive PR firms the Royals use make sure we think the Queen is industrious. The Royals’ ‘natural’ popularity is brokered. But while the Queen may be cherished, what of her subsidised offspring? What do Edward and Andrew do? Charles is not so much on a gap year as a gap life.

The high point of anti-monarchism came not in 1977 but just after Diana’s death. Now The Firm have rebranded. Diana was no republican, as she wanted her son to be King, but she challenged the Monarchy by chal- lenging the idea that her husband should keep his mistress.

Indeed even the most ardent royalist is flummoxed by the over-indulged Charles. Educated beyond his intelligence (why do the family have scarcely an A-level between them despite private coaching – are they special needs?), our future overlord still sees fit to tell architects, scientists and urban planners what to do. It’s like he feels entitled or something. The Royal prerogative is to barge in.

The public have accepted the rather engaging Camilla when his own family could not, for we commoners are a tolerant bunch. We know dysfunction when we see it. And yes, we see it. Old punk John Lydon now calls the Royals ‘more confused than most families, but then they are living in a birdcage’.

We imprison them and they are canny enough to know that to incorporate glamour, relevance or charisma into their bloodline they need the common people.

SO WE get a rebooted People’s Princess, Kate: hair, teeth, legs, who must starve herself and never say anything interesting for the rest of her life, while we publicly speculate about her fertility. Still it’s Kate and her mother-in-law, the beautiful and the dutiful, that represent the best right now.

Another old punk, Vivienne Westwood, rocks up at Royal bashes telling us that it’s all about ‘social cement’. She is right. We are trapped in halfset concrete by a system that is given a human face.

The Monarchy now functions as part soap opera, part celeb fest and floats ‘above politics’, a diminished power. This is garbage. Their existence is fundamental to our self-image, our status in life determined by a stultified class system.

Yes, the Americans may admire our tacky bling but they do not replicate it. Tourists may like the odd relic but actually Legoland is more popular than Windsor Castle.

There is still no future in England’s dreaming. And I am a patriot. So enjoy your picnic and cheer those who were born to rule. Dissent is fobbed off by crumbs from on high. I don’t begrudge Mrs Windsor or anyone else their day in the sun.

Republicans are well used to playing the long game, for who wants to talk about democracy when you can have a sausage roll under Union Flag bunting, made in China?