THE highly choreographed appearance of the future queen at the Sarah Everard vigil demonstrates that at least one pillar of our peculiar semi-feudal bourgeois state has its wits about it.

If this expedition was at her own initiative it displays a welcome sense of independence in breaching the unspoken protocols which govern the public appearances of the Royal Family. If not, it is a particularly hypocritical pretence in which her husband, our future king, is either complicit or if not, paradoxically an equally subversive enemy of convention.

The monarchy — which sits at the centre of the system of state power in Britain — has had a bad week or two as its collective family value systems and modes of behaviour are revealed to be a spectacularly bad fit for a year in which Black Lives Matter has compelled a radical examination of imperialism in the modern era and has tested the mechanisms for maintaining public order.