‘Jubilee weekend may be worth £80million to help kick-start the economic recovery’

• SYMPATHY for Peter Cave (Some of us will choose not to celebrate this jubilee, May 26) about helping those in need instead of the jubilee stuff, but the weekend may be worth £80million to help kick-start the economic recovery.

Maybe we should celebrate Thomas Paine’s comment on monarchy 230 years ago in Rights of Man (1791-2): “I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to be open, and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter.”

If Peter Cave requires a deeper take, here’s Christopher Hitchens’s: “The British monarchy inculcates unthinking credulity and servility. It forms a heavy layer on the general encrustation of our unreformed political institutions.

“It is the gilded peg from which our unlovely system of social distinction and hierarchy depends. It is an obstacle to the objective public discussion of our own history. It tribalises politics. It entrenches the absurdity of the hereditary principle.

“It contributes to what sometimes looks like an enfeeblement of the national intelligence, drawing from our press and even from some of our poets [a] sort of degrading and abnegating propaganda… It is, in short, neither dignified nor efficient”.

John Osborne’s gold tooth in a mouthful of decay?

MIKE BOR, W2