PETER HITCHENS: Sacking old peers will lead to President Blair getting a 21-gun salute

How sad it was to watch King Charles, crowned and robed and seated on his throne, ­pronounce the death warrant of the monarchy. But he had no choice.

Amid the Blairite drivel and slogans of the official speech on Wednesday were the stark words 'measures to ­modernise the constitution will be introduced, including House of Lords reform to remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the Lords'.

Once they are gone, and they will be swiftly bundled out, the King will be the last remaining hereditary person in the government. 

The few remaining proper peers were a sort of constitutional bodyguard. As long as they survived, after Sir Anthony Blair's original cull, the throne was – sort of – safe. But with them gone, why should the King have his remaining powers? Why should he be there at all?

Labour activists loathe the monarchy so much that they have banned themselves from discussing the issue since 1923. Since then, Labour has kept its republicanism ­confined to fringe meetings, back rooms and unread magazines. It knows that it plays badly with many of its own voters. Or it did. But for how much longer?

Millions are now indifferent to the ­monarchy. Others, propagandised for years by 'alternative' comedians, think they loathe the crown.

Labour dislikes monarchy because it hates the whole idea of inheritance and the family it sustains. Everything should be based upon the state, not on such private, uncontrollable things. That's why it rejoices in death duties, using tax to stop parents handing on their savings to their children.

Inheritance is the foundation of the family, and the family is the foundation of private life and of Christian morality, a tiny Kingdom where we can be ourselves, pass on lore and tradition, and be left alone.

Labour resents and seeks to undermine these private things. For it believes in the goodness of the state, and in its own right to interfere in every aspect of our lives to make us better. 

And it wants all the trappings of Kingship for itself. Look at the grand ceremonies, the parades, fly-pasts, gold-fringed banners and giant statues, which surround the leaders of Left-wing dictatorships and republics. But they cannot have them for as long as there is a King upon the throne. He sits where they would like to sit.

Didn't you often get the impression that Sir Anthony Blair would have enjoyed the occasional ­outing in a horse-drawn carriage, and a 21-gun salute or two?

Even if the King does nothing more than keep Blair, and people like him, off the Buckingham ­Palace balcony, that alone makes it worth having a monarchy. That's what they don't like.

And inch by inch and peer by peer they still hope to dismantle the throne, perhaps hoping Australia will start the ball rolling towards final abolition.

I am still waiting for Boris Johnson's response to my challenge to him to debate with me about Ukraine. Come on, Al.

Scarlett is too bright a star for this

I wanted Fly Me To The Moon to be a good film. The 1969 Moon landing remains extraordinarily moving, if you remember that actual day, and looking up at the Moon that actual night, as I do.

Having since then actually seen a Russian space launch, I find these events even more stirring. It takes such ferocious power to fight our way out of the atmosphere, that we must surely be incredibly strongly protected by that atmosphere.

But the film isn't any good. Scarlett Johansson, left, who increasingly looks more like Marilyn Monroe than Miss Monroe ever did, makes a silly plot seem bearable, and also gives too much glamour to the late 1960s, an era when such glamour was already fading and the modern world was starting to look scruffy and rundown.

Chilling consequences of green dogma

The dogma of climate change is the modern equivalent of Marxist teaching in the old Communist world, a sacred belief on the Left that thrusts itself into every aspect of life from arithmetic to children's books. It is part of the 'Red-Green' creed that Sir Keir Starmer learned in his days as a disciple of the adventurous Greek Trotskyist Michalis Raptis.

Its supporters seek to indoctrinate even tiny children with it (along with the anti-family propaganda of sex education). Now doctors are being told to raise the topic in consultations.

Yet, like the Marxist rubbish of the Stalin era, it bears little relation to reality.

National Grid announced last week that this country will still need to rely on gas to keep working, for years ahead. Why, even the co-leader of the Green Party, Carla Denyer, admits she still has a gas boiler in what I expect is her otherwise perfectly Left-wing home. She's getting quotes for a noisy, expensive heat-pump instead, just as Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is working on ensuring that we will soon have a less efficient and more expensive grid system.

And for what? Even if you believe the Green faith, Britain's efforts to strangle its economy with wind farms and solar farms are totally cancelled out by China and India and their ever-expanding use of coal.

I reckon Utopia is going to be very cold.

Lucy Letby was given a whole-life jail sentence 335 days ago, during which grave doubts have grown about her conviction. The justice system is reluctant to re-examine the case. The Appeal Court has refused Ms Letby leave to appeal. The Criminal Cases Review Commission, which might intervene, is mired in political trouble. If she is innocent, and I do not claim to know this, then every day she spends locked up will have been an outrage. We need a faster means of re-examining questionable cases.

Here is a notice observed by my surveillance team in Oxford, proclaiming that a (non-existent) footpath is 'under control'. I do not know who this mysterious controller may be, or what he or she does not want us to do there. But there is something very Starmerish about it.

Some guesses about Thomas Crooks, the young man who was idiotically allowed to climb on a roof within range of Donald Trump while carrying a rifle. He will have been 'diagnosed with ADHD' and given amphetamines from an early age. He may then have moved on to SSRI 'antidepressants'. And he will have smoked marijuana, now effectively legal in most parts of the US. All these things are now so normal in America that reporters won't even have noticed them. But they might explain his mad actions.