Nobody wins when the police detain people for holding up blank paper

The police detained a man holding up a blank piece of paper in Cornwall last week. A blank piece of paper can mean anything — a blank piece of paper is filled with possibilities — but it was a protest against monarchy.

The Prince and Princess of Wales were visiting the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth. A man held up the page, shouted an anti-monarchy sentiment and was detained, as similar protestors were detained in the early days of the King’s reign at Edinburgh and at Oxford, including an academic who remarked that no one had voted for the King, which is true.

I would call it un-British — I’m an optimist — but it clearly isn’t. Republicans — exactly a quarter of the population, according to the latest YouGov poll, rising to half of under-24s — had better watch what they say, and where they say it.

This doesn’t serve the monarchy, or us, whom it serves. The new laws on protest mean the police think they can arrest anyone they want (they are wrong), and they do. They arrest journalists, and women attending a vigil for Sarah Everard, who was killed by one of their own, and people holding up stationery. I wonder if they understand that our monarchy is both a pretty curio and a dazzling contradiction.

Are the police, whose recent idiocies (and crimes) are too many to detail in this column, aware that the Windsors now exist, in their own minds and those of their supporters, to preserve our liberal democracy? They are its guardians. That is the respectable argument for their rule: to protect us from over-reaching politicians, and their bloody tyrannies; from a Victor Orban, a Vladimir Putin, a Donald Trump. (I don’t accept the tourism argument for monarchy. Four of the five top global tourist destinations are republics. The other one is Spain).

The blank piece of paper protest was invented in Hong Kong as pro-democracy activists measured the breadth of China’s lies, and perfected in Russia in the early days of the war against Ukraine. That alone should secure its use in Britain: whatever a tyrant hates, we should want.

There is no suggestion that the detention was approved of by the royal family, and I would be amazed if it were. They get worse from the tabloids, and, during a 2010 riot sparked by tuition fees, when the now King’s car was surrounded and attacked by protesters as it took him to the Royal Variety Performance, his protection officers did not even fire their guns into the air. They rule by consent, and they, at least, know it.

The late Queen was shot at during Trooping the Colour in 1981. Apart from soothing her horse, she barely reacted. I doubt she would have noticed, let alone minded, a blank piece of paper but she knew her job. A democracy that welcomes protest is a confident democracy, and one that doesn’t won’t stay a democracy for long. If we are threatened by a blank piece of paper near a prince — or if he is — there really is no hope for us. If we see a lot of this around the coronation the King might fairly ask: what exactly am I for?

there is happy news for Prince Andrew. In Scoop, a forthcoming film about his disastrous Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis, in which he said he couldn’t sweat and had very clear memories about Pizza Express in Woking, he will be played by Rufus Sewell. This should cheer the prince: Sewell has a gift for tragic heroes. He was marvellous as the suicidal Jewish artist Mark Gertler in Carrington — you should view the Gertlers at the Tate — and as Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch, and as the Reverend Duchemin in Parade’s End, who went mad.

He is handsome too: it’s hard to imagine him fitting easily into to the wobbly, self-piteous TV addict with a teddy bear collection that is the King’s younger brother.

Andrew may be a pathetic thing, but he will be pleasing to look at, and there’s a metaphor.