Quango - Yacht Rock Anthem

When the mother of her grandchildren was killed by MI5 in a Parisian tunnel, The Queen famously failed to shed any public tears. When her sister went to the great Mustique cocktail party in the sky, Brenda once again looked into her tear ducts, and found only sawdust. The only time Her Majesty has ever dripped noticeably from her Royal eyeholes was in 1997. The occasion? The decommissioning of the Royal Yacht Britannia. For this reason if nothing else, self-described 'ardent royalist' and Education Secretary Michael Gove must have thought he was onto a winner when he wrote to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, imploring him to invest in the best monarchy in the goddamned world by buying The Queen a new yacht. Surely, he reasoned, the essential nobility of royalty can only be seen in full if said monarch is mobile on water? After all, the House Of Saud has five yachts, one of which is the ninth-largest in the world. Even pissant royal houses like the Norwegians and Dutch have managed to keep their ageing flagships afloat. It must have seemed obvious that a grateful nation would rejoice at Gove's ingenuity, and Sir Michael would be invited to Balmoral to kill all the swans he wanted with his bare hands. But no, it turned out that the 'grateful nation' he wrote about in his letter did not exist. There was merely an ungrateful one, the citizens of whom stormed the nation's comment boards with their prole-mouthed proclamations about how the £60million asking price could pay for 'EMA for 38,000 kids', or '9,000 people to get Disability Living Allowance' whether they wanted it or not. The Queen, it now seems, will have to make do with the sort of gifts that indolent, spoiled children get their parents up and down the land: an M&S voucher and one of those 'experience' ballooning trips that Virgin offer. She has reigned over us, and now we are raining on her parade. Gove inadvertently underlined a sea change in British public feeling. The reaction to his leaked comments shows we are incontestably a nation of financially-illiterate austerity-fetishists, who nowadays spend all our time trying to kibosh anything that looks too much like fun for other people without doing the sums first. The same whiny bloggers who suggested 38,000 kids could have their EMA returned to them didn't seem to realise that they could do likewise: just two quid a year from every taxpayer in the country would easily see to it. Sixty million pounds probably seems like a lot of money if you're driving a bus in Sunderland, but it's chump change to HMRC: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office budget – a minnow amongst departments – is £2.3bn alone. Within that, Britain spends £106m every year on something called 'conflict prevention grants', whatever that is, probably teaching yoga to gay Sudanese refugees on the South Bank. Would there be noticeably more conflict in the world should these grants be withdrawn? Unlikely. Would there be a fantastically awesome monarch stood astride a literally awesome yacht should the funding be diverted? You bet your ass there would, and unlike 'conflict resolution', the yacht could be sold off at a gentle rate of depreciation when the time came. But no: instead of this happy, other world, Britain continues to glumly self-flagellate, creaming our undies every time an MP decides he'd like to charge the public purse for a hobnob instead of a water biscuit, and fusting about Fred Goodwin's £500,000 pension when that sum wouldn't cover the cost of buying paper for the Royal Bank of Scotland's ATMs for a year. When the time comes for The Queen to pass on, these same austerity-mongers will want to sling her out front of Buck House in a black bag for Westminster Council to collect. The frothing Trots won't even have the good grace to thank Eric Pickles for reinstating weekly bin collections. Even they should admit that there's nothing sadder than the smell of a decaying ex-monarch mingling in one's nostrils with the remnants of last Tuesday's masala sauce.

Illustration by Joss Frank

Previously: Quango - You Can't Fry a Mars Bar in North Sea Oil