Call me old-fashioned, but I think the monarchy is Britain's cancer. Everything good about Britain - the anti-authoritarian impulse, the dog-eared, individualist aesthetic - is anti-monarchical. Equally, all of Britain's snobs and nationalists are obsessed with the monarchy, and what it “represents” – an empire that died long before Prince Charles was born. But then the same virtues make Britain anti-republican and irreligious. Perhaps it's appropriate that the British should pledge their subservience to a family of idiotic, numbly bourgeois, toothless grotesques, rather than a hollow abstraction or a meaninglessly benevolent divinity. Not that the British don't have gods or principles, but their gods are foolish and fallible, and their principles are point-to-point, and the country itself has always been in moral freefall.

Prince Charles’ recently disclosed diaries uncover the royal cancer. His pettiness – worrying about what class he’s on in a plane, the de-commissioning of the royal yacht – is coupled with his arrogance – apparently he feels constitutionally bound to declare his “unpopular” opinions. There is not a scrap of sovereignty in this sovereign.

The British spirit is the spirit of farce. The Charles’ diary story, like most British celebrity scandals, is a Goldoni comedy of puffed-up masters being pricked by mischievous servants, and it’s this spectacle that makes Britain Great.