I hear that half the cinema seats of Ireland are still soppy with tears from people blubbing at the yarn of a stammering king triumphing over disability and inspiring his people to win a war against Hitler.

Movies about history don’t have to be factual. But they shouldn’t deliberately lie, either. The King’s Speech, which I have belatedly just seen, is an exercise in calculated political distortion from opening credits to closing crescendo.
Maybe the torment that George VI suffered as he strove to learn to articulate words is faithfully rendered. But the broad thrust of the narrative, which supplies the story its wider resonance - that he possessed an innate decency that came to epitomise and sustain the spirit of the British people as they faced the threat of invasion - is entirely fraudulent. Since the facts are well-known to every historian of the period, this must have been intentional.
George’s older brother, the might-have-been Edward VIII, is portrayed as a Nazi sympathiser, which he was. A blessing for the world then, we are invited to believe, that he preferred a harridan Yank to the throne of England, and handed the office of monarch to George.
In fact the brother and the harridan weren’t sympathisers but outright Nazis. George was the sympathiser. Or at least an appeaser. Far from providing a focus for anti-fascist patriotism, he lamented the failure of Premier Neville Chamberlain and the Daily Mail crowd to appease Hitler by giving him free rein to rampage across Europe to within sight of the cliffs of Kent. His wife, Elizabeth, the late Queen Mum, was a racist bigot with a disdain for democracy to the day she belatedly died.
The notion of this pair of parasites as folks of fine quality and patriotic courage during World War Two is the founding myth of the modern British monarchy. Previous kings and queens were decidedly unpopular. But George was the “good king” promoted as a man deserving of the love of the people at their time of trial. To admit the truth would be to acknowledge that the current Elizabeth and her sprawling brood emerged from a spawn-bed of hypocrisy and sleaze. And we can’t have that, can we? Not now that Mary McAleese is airing the beds at Aras an Uachtarain for them to rest their royal heads on, once they have made it past the multitudes thronging the quays waving their caps and loudly chorusing Hurrah! Hurrah!
Let us instead emulate the traditional response of young English proletarians just a couple of months ago when they chanced upon Big Ears and his Mouldy Mot on Oxford Street: “Off With Their Heads!”

Few readers will have hailed it as a breakthrough that Pat Robertson has come out in favour of decriminalising cannabis.
Robertson is a leading figure on the evangelical Right of US politics. He demands the removal from school boards of anyone who refuses to accept that God created the world in six days flat back in 4004 BC and then scattered dinosaur fossils around to confuse the heathens and test believers’ faith.
He had a distinctive analysis of the causes of the Haitian earthquake: “Haitians were originally under the heel of the French, Napoleon the third or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it’s a deal. Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”
Then there’s his forthright views on women: “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
Now he has told his TV audience: “We’re locking up people that have taken a couple puffs of marijuana and next thing you know they’ve got 10 years with mandatory sentences... I’m not exactly for the use of drugs, don’t get me wrong, but criminalising marijuana, criminalising the possession of a few ounces of pot, that kinda thing is costing us a fortune and it’s ruining young people.”
Difficult one to handle, this. Should we risk the respectability of the cause by accepting support from a guy whose opinions on every other issue are mad?
On the other hand, doesn’t the fact that someone like Robertson has come round to our side show that the case has become incontestable?
Should we shut him out or usher him in?
Answers, please, on a king-sized Rizla.
(Has anyone ever seen anyone using a king-size for any other purpose?)

Last month, Scottish socialist Tommy Sheridan was given three years for perjuring himself during a libel case against the News of the World which had claimed he’d visited a “swingers’ club” in Manchester. This month, Bertie Ahern retired from the Dail with a pension worth a multiple of the average wage and is talking again about a run for the presidency. It will be recalled that Ahern, under oath, told the Moriarty Tribunal a series of cock and bull stories about the sources of the sizable sums of money he’d trousered while in office.
I suppose he might even be elected to the Áras if he isn’t in jail.
When, I ask again, will the guards feel the collar of this shameless ruffian?