Being king or queen is like a weird form of slavery. You’re captured at birth; forced into a life of exhausting work, with little opportunity to resign or retire – except in the most public fashion possible (as Edward VIII discovered). The monarch is constitutionally obliged to do what their government tells them, including duties most sensible people would simply refuse, such as being nice to some of the world’s most unsavoury characters.

In 1971, the Queen Elizabeth II gave a state banquet for the Ugandan despot Idi Amin. Shortly afterwards Amin expelled more than 60,000 Ugandan Asians, and later murdered hundreds of thousands of his opponents, many thrown to the crocodiles in Lake Victoria.

Twenty-three years later, the Queen was obliged to host another state visit, for the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, even though Britain knew Mugabe had also massacred tens of thousands of his people.

And in 1978, the Callaghan government told the Queen to welcome the Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceaușescu to stay at Buckingham Palace, hoping the Romanians would place a big arms order. The Queen, we’re told, even hid behind a bush to avoid talking to the Ceaușescus.

The Royal Family has a long record of having to suck up to tyrants to further our national interests. Yet, before he came to the throne, Charles occasionally rebelled against this. In 1999 he avoided a dinner with the Chinese leadership out of distaste for the Beijing regime, and........

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