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I don’t watch much TV and rarely watch live TV, but I did so recently and was quite surprised by the adverts, particularly that there were so many for gambling. The theme of the gambling ones seemed to be “it’s great fun and you will love doing it” shortly followed by “don’t do it very much and you can get help to stop” which seemed quite incongruous to me.

However, the ones that really struck me were for a cruise line, advertising a “dream cruise”. The picture that accompanied them seemed to me to be quite horrifying, one was something like the picture below and others showed liners amongst beautiful scenery in fjords or whatever. The only thing that these adverts said to me was “environmental disaster”. I have never been on a cruise and certainly wouldn’t want to go on one after seeing these adverts.

Perhaps I am weird (many would say so!), but it makes me wonder whether these adverts actually result in people buying the product (gambling or cruises) . I am afraid that they put me off.

The Government has spent months congratulating itself on our vaccination programme, but vaccinating everyone does not seem to be its strategy. We had a fast rollout by using the Astra-Zeneca vaccine which was easier to distribute than the mRNA vaccines, but which has proved to be less effective. Today we have a lower proportion of our population vaccinated than most European countries (UK: 66.93%% vs France: 67.88%, Italy: 71.32%, Ireland: 75.21%, Spain: 79.77%, Portugal: 87.16%). Most of these have had measures to encourage vaccines take-up such as a requirement to have a Covid pass for many public venues such as bars and restaurants.

We are trying to catch-up for the lower effectiveness of AZ by giving a mRNA booster, which will no doubt be a considerable help. However there doesn’t seem to be any strategy to encourage greater take-up. I presume that this is because the government does not believe that it could get its own party to support more authoritarian measures and as a result its strategy for the remaining third of people who are unvaccinated is to let them catch Covid in order to get antibodies into their bodies. At least our Covid death rate is moderate (we are 27th on the list of deaths/1m population), so maybe it is a tolerable strategic choice.

Our Queen is 95 and has been a dedicated public servant for all her life. She now seems to be struggling to perform her role, a problem that is only likely to get worse over the next few years. An old monarch is a modern problem as no-one lived that long in the past and monarchs in days gone buy were liable to be dethroned by an upstart once they got old. Of course there are a few notable exceptions, but that was the general scheme.

Whatever you think of the Monarchy, and I am somewhat ambivalent, it doesn’t seem sensible to me to have a head of state that is so old and infirm that they can no longer perform their duties. It is said that she will never abdicate, but I don’t buy all the “called by God to the role” stuff. She is in a job she can no longer perform effectively and I think she should retire.

On the other hand, she may realise that the enthronement of King Charles is likely to be the beginning of the end of the Monarchy and so is hanging on for as long as she can. Unfortunately her descendants have created a royal soap opera that would be unbelievable if it was fiction which has fatally damaged the institution. It is possible that they are just symptoms of an institution in terminal decline who are caught up in the whole sorry spectacle. It doesn’t really matter – they should just get on with the succession and let the end game commence.