JUST OCCASIONALLY the intimate relationship between Britain’s royals and the Saudi Arabian dynasty — a family raised by the masters of the British empire from a nomadic existence to rule over the Arabian sands — is exposed to scrutiny.

When Turkish intelligence let it be known that they had audio on the 2018 dismemberment — by royal appointment — of the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi the carefully contrived image of Mohammed Bin Salman as an enlightened ruler virtuously engaged in modernising his desert kingdom took a fatal hit.

The assassination was carried out by the personal entourage of Salman. After secret “trials” three of his top security officials were acquitted, a clutch of junior officials were condemned to death and as the tradition has it, pardoned according to the wishes of Khashoggi’s family whose consent to this procedure was no doubt hastened by a combination of sticks and carrots.

Just seven months earlier Salman was glad-handed by Boris Johnson and treated to a Buck House lunch. In a touching gesture our monarch received her guest wearing a dress of a maroon hue that almost echoed the colour of his keffiyeh.

Salman takes credit for his reforming zeal in permitting women to drive motor cars. Maybe he got the idea that women are capable of driving from his his predecessor King Abdullah who, it appears, was invited by Her Majesty the Queen for a tour of Balmoral.

The tale has it that our Liz — who drove military vehicles during her war service — gleefully took the Saudi royal on a breakneck tour of the local attractions reportedly frightening the life out of her septuagenarian fellow royal.

Total British arms sales to Saudi Arabia since the bombing of neighbouring Yemen commenced now exceed £20 billion and Saudi armed forces are using British-built and licensed arms in Yemen, including Typhoon aircraft, missiles and bombs.

No new export licences were issued after the Court of Appeal concluded the government’s decision-making process for granting export licences was unlawful — but Liz Truss reversed this in July 2020.

The cosy links with the Saudis endure. Her oldest son may face police questioning over suggestions that his advisers contrived a Companionship of the British Empire for a Saudi tycoon, royally entertained at Charles’s Clarence House residence, who has given generously to his host’s charities.

Liz herself gets a free pass on much of this stuff. People sympathise with her plight — the unending and wearying functions she is compelled to attend, her now deceased gaffe-prone consort, her dysfunctional family, annoying relatives and errant children.

As for her younger (and reportedly favourite) son the ditty has it: “Oh the grand old Duke of York, he had 12 million quid, he gave it to someone he’d never met for something he never did.”

Any residual sympathy should be reserved for his former wife whose divorce settlement was just a quarter of that.

The collateral damage to Liz lies in the fact, widely held to be true, that the supposedly cash-strapped prince was bankrolled by the Bank of Mum drawing on tax-free funds held by the Duchy of Lancaster (aka herself). That leaves us, the plebeian masses, picking up the bill.

The suggestion — put forward by the ludicrous BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell — that Andrew could work his passage back to public acceptance by becoming a campaigner against sex trafficking has invited derision laced with contempt.

Labour MP Jess Phillips kissed goodbye to her chances of an OBE when she condemned the manner in which Andrew and his legal team “victim-blamed” and showed little regard for any child victim of historic abuse. “Why on Earth”, she asked, “does he think he can help or that people would want his help.”

My local council — Swale in Kent — is offering community groups up to £1,000 for projects which to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.

I am torn between a proposal to name the as-yet unconstructed swing bridge over Faversham Creek after after the Second English Republic (as its installation is unaccountably delayed) or suggest that the Queen Elizabeth the Second Dartford Crossing be renamed after Essex hero Wat Tyler whose greatest exploits took place this side of the Thames estuary.

When surveyed in 2021 support for the monarchy overall ran at 61 per cent with 24 per cent favouring an elected head of state. But every lower age group records lower levels of support for the monarchy and rising support for the alternative — among 18 to 24-year-olds the monarch has just 31 per cent support with 41 per cent opposed.

It seems improbable — even taking into account the reputational damage that bailing out her son has brought — that the present monarch will see much damage to her 83 per cent popularity rating.

The immediate heir to the throne, Charles, gets a much lower rating at 60 per cent .

Both Charles’s reduced but still substantial rating and the comparable one which his second wife attracts can be explained by a very active campaign to shape public opinion in anticipation of his accession to the throne. Charles’s disgraced younger brother faces calls by the citizens of York for him to be stripped of his title Duke of York.

In the same time frame in which Andrew’s get-out-of-jail-for-£12-million settlement became public, Liz let the world know that she would like her heir’s wife to be known as the Queen Consort. This is less a promotion but rather a relabelling of a longstanding relationship.

But less any elected Member of Parliament, or Lord Spiritual or Temporal, think of criticising the duke in either of the Houses of Parliament they face sanctions because: “No question can be put which brings the name of the sovereign or the influence of the crown directly before Parliament, or which casts reflections upon the sovereign or the royal family.”

The Establishment view is that loyalty to the monarch is a necessary tradition and when our rulers sense things are not going their way — Harold Wilson’s radical stirrings in the ’60s and Jeremy Corbyn’s runaway victory in the Labour leadership election for example — the upper echelons of the bourgeois state, military, intelligence etc mutter that their oath of loyalty to the crown trumps any vote by the people.

The evidence — that support is much shallower for all members of the family and is eroding — is a worry for the Establishment for whom the symbolic and constitutional position of the Queen (or king) in Parliament is an essential element in maintaining the continuity of the political system.

The ideological effect is equally important in reinforcing the notion that the monarchy is an eternal guarantee of stability.

It was not always so and the present (mostly German) Saxe-Coburg dynasty is simply the latest in a series of foreign transplants that the British ruling class imports in the absence of any credible domestic outfit.

Republican sentiment in Britain rose sharply during the 19th-century Chartist campaigns for adult male suffrage and the increasingly insurgent masses adopted the British republican colours of red, white and green with the motto “fraternity, liberty and humanity.” Contemporary accounts of the vast 1848 Chartist assembly at Kennington Green had these colours carried alongside the green of the Irish contingent.

It has taken an unremitting campaign to mystify the functioning of the monarchy in the operations of the bourgeois state — not least in exploiting the fruits of imperial rule over a vast part of the globe — to gentle the British people into acceptance of the present crowd.

It was inevitable that our bourgeoisie’s bid to ally with fascism against the Soviet Union would involve the royal family. And it took a very systematic effort to present these Saxe-Coburgs, a German aristocratic caste with a Nazi-sympathising scion on the throne, as exemplars of British patriotism.

With occasional exceptions the human material available does not bear up particularly well under the constant pressure to conform to an impossible ideal and in our present day media environment this is particularly difficult to obscure.

The tensions that naturally arise when the normal exercise of personal choice in relationships meets the expectations of rigid protocol laced with patrician prejudice has resulted in one princeling choosing to live in California.

When a winter cold, or a resolutely republican virus, makes the question of Charles’s accession to the throne imminent there will be an extensive campaign to suppress or rework the legend of Diana, his first wife.

It was the drama of her plight and her fatal bid to escape that broke, for present-day generations, much of the royal myth.

There is already a strategy to present the following succession — of Charles’s eldest son — as a seamless continuation of British tradition with his commoner wife as a symbol of the royal family’s adaption to modern conditions.

But it is not simply the inevitable prospect of yet another royal scandal of personal impropriety or venality that threatens the durability of the royal family’s place in British society.

The formula is ceasing to work. As the British-born Irish revolutionary James Connolly wrote: “People mentally poisoned by the adulation of royalty can never attain to that spirit of self-reliant democracy necessary for the attainment of social freedom.”

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.