Delingpole on Abu Hamza

Like many razor-sharp 86-year-olds, the Queen must spend an awful lot of time wondering what the hell became of the Britain she knew in her youth, and of all those common sense values and that basic decency which saw us through trials like the Second World War.

Unlike the rest of her generation, she is constitutionally prevented from saying this aloud. But just occasionally her private views slip out. And when they do, my how you wish she was actually running the country herself rather than leaving it to idiots like her useless fifth cousin Dave.

Take her views on the evil, hook-handed terrorist Abu Hamza. According to the BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner (himself a victim of the kind of Islamist violence Hamza so heartily advocates) the Queen thinks that he's a bad thing. So much so that she once lobbied the then Home Secretary to have him put away.

Gardner told the Today programme:

“She spoke to the Home Secretary at the time and said, ‘surely this man must have broken some laws, my goodness, why is he still at large?’

“Because he was conducting these radical activities, he called Britain a toilet, he was incredibly anti-British, and yet he was sucking up money from this country for a long time. He was a huge embarrassment to Muslims, who condemned him.”

The Queen was right, of course.

Abu Hamza is the terrorist who our legal authorities refused to extradite to Yemen for his involvement in a bomb plot (for which his sons were convicted), continued to preach hate against the adoptive country which was paying him £500 a month in incapacity benefits (for his hook hand) and ended up radicalising the 7/7 bombers thus indirectly causing the deaths of 52 innocent people.

According to the Taxpayer's Alliance this charming father-of-eight has so far cost us all £2.75 million in welfare payments, council housing, NHS and prison bills, trials and legal appeals.

Yet for years he has been playing the system, abusing the generosity of the British taxpayer, exploiting EU-driven Human Rights law and almost literally getting away with murder.

But the question we should surely be asking ourselves is: if it's so obvious to the Queen – and all the rest of us – why it so un-obvious to our elected representatives. Why do they fail our interests again and again? Isn't that the point of representative democracy: that the politicians are the servants of the people, there to embody the popular will?

At the moment they're not doing their job. Not in the slightest. In the 1640s I would have sided with parliament against the monarchy. Right now (at least till Charles takes over), I'd happily take up arms against Westminster on behalf of our glorious monarch.