Grovelling  Reading the contents of your website was a great awakening for me. You have been able to articulate what I’ve been thinking myself for years. The idea that the British people should display grovelling respect to the members of one family because they are ‘royal’ is nonsense. True respect has to be earned; it is not due to someone because of an accident of birth.   

True respect  I cannot think of a better example than when I was part of the great multitude that had assembled in Trafalgar Square in the summer of 1996 to greet Nelson Mandela on his visit to London. As Mandela alighted from his car at the end of Whitehall and walked through the ecstatic crowd to South Africa House, he was enveloped by the warmth and admiration of the assembled masses. It was the most remarkable example of collective love and respect given to an individual that I have ever experienced. For what the people there realised was that standing before them was a genuine prince among men. Imprisonment by the apartheid regime in South Africa had not diminished his dignity, but had served to make it greater. 

Majesty  Moreover, after  Mandela's  release from jail, he exhibited none of the rancour and bitterness one might expect. On becoming the new leader of South Africa, he shunned the vanity of office. Mandela could live in a hovel and the world would still beat a pathway to his door. Genuine majesty comes from within the individual, not from gilded palaces.