You have to laugh at all this gumpf about modernising the most archaic institution on the planet; how can you imbue ‘equality’ on the most unfair institution ever known to man? What’s the point? There’s no popular clamoring for this measure: it’s being pushed by political elites. If equality really is the litmus test for legitimacy then we might as well scrap the monarchy now.

Either way, the arguments for the change are weak and facile – equality for the sake of equality isn’t a cogent argument. Western civilisation understands genealogy and lineage through the male line, and what is monarchy but the epitome of lineage? If the monarch has a raft of daughters then we’d effectively be inaugurating a new dynasty / House come marriage and subsequent offspring. No, this is a facile measure that plays to popular prejudices and trends of our day when, in reality, the monarchy should be a bastion of continuity, stretching far, far back into the past. That, in effect, is what allures people to it; this mindless tinkering really won’t do.

I agree that both gender and age discrimination must be done away with immediately. But certainly the most discriminatory aspect of the monarchy is that it is hereditary. Why should a person become king or queen by accident of birth? How utterly unfair. To really reform the monarchy, new kings and queens must either be chosen by lottery so that no one is discriminated against, or perhaps by merit, say, by popular vote on a reality tv show similar to Britain’s Got Talent. The United States tried something a bit similar to this on a very small scale in the late 1950s and early 1960s on Queen for a Day.