I’m no Royalist – as anyone who wants to compliment King Charles III over his speech to Congress yesterday clearly needs to establish – but, yes, I too thought it showed a masterful ability to navigate the choppy waters he was confronted with, in spite of the present situation of Anglo-American relations, and especially in the face of the Mad King Donald. (Was he there?) Sailing between the Scylla of flattering our most powerful one-time ally, and the Charybdis of telling him what we Brits really think of him – viz that moment in Love Actually – Charles managed, albeit in ways that were probably too clever and subtle for Trump to understand, to remind him of the British-origin values that had inspired the Founding Fathers 250 years ago, and which Trump is presently demolishing; without Charles’s ship foundering, and maybe – just maybe – to some good effect. (We’ll not know for some time.) In any case, I’m uncharacteristically proud of him.

The event also boosted my support for the institution of ‘Constitutional Monarchy’: figurehead Kings, Queens and unelected Presidents; who stand above everyday politics, but can remind people of their nations’ underlying values, even when those values slowly change. Most current European monarchies are like that, including the two – the UK and Sweden – that I’ve sworn allegiance to. So, of course, is Canada, sharing one of those monarchies with us Brits, and demonstrably more faithful to its liberal and democratic values (forget the class system for a moment) than is the present-day USA. Mark Carney, of course, is a Canadian.