OPINION - There’s a lot to be said for monarchy — but just think what we ask from the royals

The older and more frightened I get, the more tolerant I am of monarchy. As the political space becomes more polarised and violent, I see the benefits of letting a disinterested figurehead too rich to be bribed be at the centre of that space: to prevent something more malevolent occupying it. It isn’t dynamic, of course, and it calcifies the class system. It doesn’t have to, it just has. It comforts a declining country which might do better arresting that decline than sinking into the imagined landscape of a commemorative tea towel. But there are worse things than a responsible sovereign. Donald Trump, who I can’t even look at, shows us that.