I would like to see a Tibet free from Chinese rule, but not if that meant handing it over to a saffron-robed monarch to take it back into the feudal era. The days of monarchy should be in the distant past of our species. Monarchy is simply offensive. The monarchical system of Tibet is based on the rule by monks, a class which recruits its own replacements according to their own arcane sets of beliefs. It is a self-perpetuating oligarchy, and those are bad, by definition.

To run a society there has to be some form of leadership and administration, these tend to come from the elite in particular societies. Anarchy, the idea that no form of leadership or organization is required is not an option. There must be a leadership, an absence of leadership will draw in a new leadership, and new leaderships always have to have troops to protect them from alternative new leaderships and all the troops need food and other forms of payment for services rendered. Power can be spread around and shared, it can be made accountable, it can be divided, devolved and diluted but it cannot be done away with. There will always be some form of an elite running society and the economy and it is also obvious that these people are not going to be content with a standard of living which is below average on all measures and it is very unlikely that the standard of living of the elites is not above average on most measures. However there is no reason to expect that it is essential that the elites must always be obscenely well rewarded or corrupt. That is a possibility, a distinct possibility, but not an inevitability.

I don't believe that all power corrupts. There is a danger of power corrupting but it is not inevitable. Democratic politics tends to throw up people who have some decency about them and it tends to find out those who don't. As the saying goes you can't fool all of the people all of the time, the shits tend to get found out. Don't they Mr Hamilton?

Monarchy has no such checks and balances. You get what you're given and nature sometimes deals from the bottom of the pack. In the case of Charles Windsor nature has been rather vindictive. There would not have been any chance whatsoever of Charles Windsor ever coming to public prominence in any field at all if he was not heir to the throne. He even lacks the gumption to be a serial killer. These days with the exception of reality television shows we only see stupid people on television if they are sportsmen and we only see talentless stupid people on television if they are royalty. It was no surprise that Jade Goody's death was treated as like the death of a member of the royal family, it was so easy to make the connection: here was somebody famous for being famous, stupid, rich without a good excuse and people were interested in her life, her children and her fatuous beliefs. Of course they treated her like royalty, she wasn't a fictional soap opera character so what other model is there?

What does royalty do? They represent a country. They embody a slowly changing mix of values. They are seen, they don't say much and they wave. In other words they perform exactly the same functions as the anonymous actor who wears the Mickey Mouse costume in Disneyland. They are in effect fictional characters anyway so why do we need to pay people to do this job? Why couldn't the British monarchy have all its functions taken over by a combination of a small office of civil servants (replacing the royal household and those mysterious Palace spokesmen) and a member of Parliament in a John Bull costume?

My son remembers the day we went to London and walked from Trafalgar Square all the way to “that big boring building we couldn't even go into”. One day my son, one day that building will be a museum, as it should be. Let's hope we can do it without that jug-eared buffoon making our country into a laughing stock or giving Islam a role in the state.

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