Don’t get so worked up — it’s only a blog

I’m not sure how many members of the London Labour party I’ve met over the last 20 years or so. A thousand? Must be something like that. Sitting in local authority buildings which smell slightly of gas, the night outside cold and damp, ploughing through an interminable agenda of candidate selections; or down the pub after canvassing. Nice people, largely — you’d be surprised.

I’m not a member any more but a lot of my friends still are, so it’s a constituency I know very well. If you polled them on their views about the Royal Family, I suspect that somewhere between 1 and 2 per cent would declare themselves as monarchists. The rest would express an opinion anywhere on a spectrum leading from ‘they are a complete waste of time and money, an utter irrelevance, although I quite fancy Harry’ at one end to the more rigorous ‘they and their running-dog lickspittle lackeys should swing from the gibbets hewn by the honest labour of the working classes’.