Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Hi there and welcome to the Spike Podcast, my name is Ella Wheeler, I'm the assistant editor at Spiked. And today we look at the

Royal Nuttials with Freddie Gray from the spectator and our own Tom Slater. Pauline Hadaway keeps us up to date with the news on

Ireland and Brexit. And you'll hear an excerpt from my interview with author and Professor Mark Liller from this month's spiked review. The Yes, there's going to be another royal wedding. Are you celebrating? Well, I'm not particularly. As a Republican, it's hard not to get grouchy when royal news dominates the headlines. But there is something interesting in the engagement of Prince Harry and the US actress Megan Markle.

Many have celebrated the fact that Markle is a black divorced American, bringing diversity to the monarchy.

Noam Tonsky has even described the engagement as a shakeup. So, as the Royals become

more real than regal, are their days numbered? Or, as lots of us Republicans hate to admit, is their life in the crown yet?

To discuss this, I decided to go to a monarchist and a Republican.

Freddie Gray, the deputy editor of the Spectator and Spiked Deputy Editor Tom Slater, talk wedding bells.

Right, let's talk the Royal Wedding. First of all, Tom, can I start with you? As a Republican, what did you make of the engagement?

Well, I wasn't necessarily best pleased, as you'd imagine, but one of the things that struck me most and kind of irritated me most

was less the kind of fanfare around the usual royal wedding, and it was the strange way in which so many people who

would I assume to be Republicans or at least critical with the monarchy on some level

seemed to be really excited about it. I wrote about it on spite this week as a

kind of strange birth of woke monarchism insofar as an institution

that many people either didn't want much to do with or thought was pretty toxic and

ancient and all the rest of it because it was getting this slightly diverse kind of

lick of paint was suddenly very excited about it and you

saw pieces on the front page of the Guardian newspaper talking about how this is a turning point

for race in our country that would change things forever and other people who were kind of wondering

out loud if this new very diverse

millennial couple would lead us out of this kind of dark Brexit morass that we are in as a

country is a really rehabilitating the idea that the monarchy should kind of lead

...