Before treaties are signed, before armies are stood down, before trade agreements are negotiated, before anybody says anything regrettable on television, there should first be tea. Not hurled into a harbour in a fit of youthful enthusiasm. Not microwaved. Not served in a bucket with ice. Tea: brewed, poured, offered, received, and understood as the first act of peaceful intent between rational peoples.

A cup of tea is not merely a beverage. It is a pause button for history. It allows tempers to cool, voices to lower, and biscuits to be introduced. It is the foundation of diplomacy because it admits the most important political principle of all: nobody should make a major decision while thirsty, angry or insufficiently accompanied by cake.

MAGBA therefore proposes a new settlement between Britain and America, founded not on conquest, taxation or musket-based misunderstanding, but on mutual exhaustion with politics as currently practised.

We salute the No Kings movement. Its instincts are noble. Its suspicion of tyranny is admirable. Its historical memory, however, requires gentle updating. Nobody is proposing the return of Mad King George. Nobody seeks arbitrary rule, royal decrees, powdered wigs by compulsion, or the reintroduction of 18th-century dental standards.

The modern constitutional monarch is not a despot. He is not a Caesar. He is not a president in a crown. He is something much more useful: a benign, powerless, faintly amusing national figurehead whose principal constitutional function is to stop everyone else from becoming unbearable.

Even the most committed small-r republican must surely acknowledge the wisdom and wit of King Charles. Here is a man who has spent decades talking to trees, architecture, farmers, bishops, prime ministers, schoolchildren, horses and foreign dignitaries — and has, against all odds, remained polite. This is precisely the temperament required for the modern age.

The genius of monarchy, properly understood, is that it takes the politics out of politics. It gives the nation a symbol above party, above faction, above the daily shouting match. A constitutional king does not govern. He does not campaign. He does not tweet policy at midnight. He simply exists: waving, opening things, asking excellent questions, and reminding everyone that public life need not be quite so vulgar.

This is what America lacks. Not liberty. Not energy. Not ambition. America has these in heroic quantities. What America lacks is a harmless ceremonial adult in the room.

MAGBA offers that solution.

We propose no chains, no tyranny, no imperial sulking. We offer instead the soft power of tea, the stabilising influence of pageantry, and the quiet national therapy of having someone else wear the medals.

Our programme

Our programme is therefore as follows:

We do not ask America to kneel. We ask America to sit down, take tea, and consider whether the whole experiment might be improved by a little constitutional nonsense.