The trouble with the monarchy is not that it is too powerful but that it is utterly useless. So much is spent on ceremonial trappings to disguise its… - Polly Toynbee

Dominic Cummings was brought in by Johnson to swing a wrecking ball at Whitehall, local councils, the BBC and anything that smelled of good government. No surprise that those who don't believe in the state have made the worst possible fist of running it in a crisis. Brexit embodied their mindset: break away, break things and disrupt.

All I can say is that when I had come out of my faint, and read what Greg was saying, I saw, naturally, that he was absolutely right. In spite of all she gets wrong, there are things that Polly says that are serious and true, and that any Conservative government should be saying.

Sometimes it seems as if a tidal wave of the worst Western culture is creeping across the globe like a giant strawberry milkshake. How it oozes over the planet, sweet, sickly, homogenous, full of 'E' numbers, stabilisers and monosodium glutamate, tasting the same from Samoa to Siberia to Somalia. A traveller across the desert wastes of the Sahara arrives at last at Timbuktu, where the first denizen he meets is wearing a Texaco baseball cap. Pilgrims to the Himalayas in search of the ultimate wilderness in the furthest kingdom find Everest strewn with rubbish, tins, plastic bags, Coca-Cola bottles and all the remnants of the modern global picnicker. Explorers of the Arctic complain that empty plastic bottles of washing-up liquid are embedded in the ice. Global culture and its detritus wash up everywhere, nothing sacred, nothing wild, nothing authentic, original or primitive any more. These modern travellers' tales tell of cultural vandalism, Western Goths contaminating ancient civilisations and traditions untouched for centuries. If the West were to set out on a mission of global imperialism deliberately planned we would surely choose better cultural ambassadors. It is not pages from Shakespeare or scores of Mozart that litter steppe and savannah but some marketing man's logo from last year's useless, meretricious product, or a snatch of that maddening theme tune from Titanic. Was ever an empire so monstrously self-assured and ambitious? Western cultural imperialism reaches right into the hearts and souls, the sexual behaviour, the spirit, religion, politics and the nationhood of the entire world. It happens haphazardly with no master plan or empire-building blueprint, but with a vague and casual insouciance that drives its detractors to despair. So when we consider the globalisation of culture most of us bring to the subject a jumble of deep-seated alarms - moral, intellectual, political, spiritual, artistic and nationalistic, melting into a great pot of 'globalisation panic'. It causes deep pessimism about the cultural future of a world turning homogeneously horrible.