THAT most famous anti-monarchist and defender to the death of democracy and meritocracy, Thomas Paine, was not a man who was minded to pull any punches when it came to his excoriation of the existence of a hereditary monarchy:

“Kings succeed each other, not as rationals, but as animals. It signifies not what their mental or moral characters are. Can we then be surprised at the abject state of the human mind in monarchical countries, when the government itself is formed on such an abject levelling system?”

Over £100 million of taxpayers’ money is being spent, but not on feeding the hungry or housing the homeless, of which there are millions across a land whose apologists never miss an opportunity to wave their Union Jacks while boasting that Brexit has made Britain great again.

No, it is being wasted on an upcoming pageant of semi-feudal garbage that should have been consigned to the dustbin of history way before now.

Making matters still more abhorrent is the fact that King Charles inherited £650m tax-free from his mother, gets £350m a year tax-free from the taxpayer and has an estate worth £22 billion that’s never taxed. Yet still, the man can’t pay for his own coronation.

The House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, of which our glorious and noble monarch is a product, emanates not from London but Germany. The family deftly changed its name to the less Germanic-sounding Windsor under the judicious instruction of King George V in 1917 at a time when jingoism at home was all the rage and young working-class men from all over the country were being slaughtered by the thousand in the trenches in France, fighting the Germans.

Upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II at age 96 last September, Britain promptly turned into North Korea without the laughs. As I opined at the time:

“The sheer intensity of the outpouring of national grief in Britain over the death of Queen Elizabeth II at age 96 has been revelatory to behold.

“It merely confirms the extent to which we in Britain have been infantilised by this arcane semi-feudal institution and conditioned to revere a family whose only claim to such is an accident of birth and a legacy forged in blood and empire.”

Pity the nation that is lumbered with a “royal family” of sex pests, harridans, and chinless wonders. Prince Andrew had been filling his boots at Britain taxpayers’ expense for decades by the time he sat down for the now-infamous interview with Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis at Buckingham Palace in 2018.

The sense of entitlement emanating from him throughout the interview, the manner in which he seemed genuinely shocked and nonplussed when confronted by Maitlis’s forensic questioning of his relationship with American financier, sex trafficker and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, provided an invaluable insight into the cloistered world of a family whose existence in the 21st century is a shameful indictment of our toleration of a class system that makes Britain more akin to a 19th-century theme park and museum than a modern democracy.

Matters weren’t helped by the palatial surroundings of Buckingham Palace in which the interview took place. That any society which purports to be civilised could balance such obscene ostentation with levels of poverty and despair that conform to a war being waged against its poorest and most vulnerable is astonishing.

“No, it was a shooting weekend... Just a straightforward shooting weekend,” the man replied to one of Maitlis’s questions, as if shooting weekends are par for the course — like popping into your local branch of KFC for some chicken wings.

The interview actually took on the character of a spoof at times, it was so toe-curlingly embarrassing — watching this big bag of useless royal wind sitting there with his chin hanging over his collar like a latter-day Jay Gatsby, blinking like a man who’d just emerged into the light after decades spent in the darkness of a world of obscene luxury and self-gratification.

He and the other royals are human mannequins, products of an institution utterly and completely incompatible with modernity, not to mention democracy.

Its popularity among a large swathe of the British public is a sad metric of their infantilisation and the extent to which the thousands who will come out to witness this parade of human detritus at the coronation in central London have internalised the tropes of the most entrenched and wicked class system the world has ever known since the fall of Rome.

The army of rough sleepers that colonises London today, the survivors of Grenfell, the 14 million living in poverty in Britain, all of those who’ve found themselves on the receiving end of a battering in the name of austerity this past decade, including the loved ones of the 120,000 who have died as a direct result, are entitled to ask when the revolution will begin.

The rest of us, meanwhile, are obliged to demand not merely economic or political change in Britain, but constitutional change. For the time, surely, has come to sweep away the gown and wig of semi-feudalism that underpins our major institutions — the Commons, House of Lords, judiciary and, yes, the monarchy.

“Every country where begging, where mendacity, is a profession, is ill-governed,” Voltaire once wrote.

The French Enlightenment philosopher knows the British better than they know themselves.