English Heritage has just run a competition to find England’s most useless Monarch. The result was never going to be a surprise because the “winner” could only come from a handful of stinkers and duffers.

In the end they alighted on that bulbous, wasteful drunk George IV, who was so corpulent he was known as the Prince of Whales before he became King.

George was totally self-obsessed, unlike his sweet-natured father George III, who had the misfortune to suffer from the genetic disease porphyria, which made him increasingly insane.

The younger George was also nasty and brutish to his rather ugly and unhygienic wife Caroline, and scandalized the nation by gross over-spending in very hard times. The baroque dazzle of the Brighton Pavilion in no way compensates for his extravagance, indeed it neatly sums it up. The Monarchy has rarely been as unpopular than it was under King George IV.

However, my own choice is the same as historian Andrew Roberts’s — King Stephen. Here’s his assessment of this odious man:

“King Stephen usurped his uncle Henry I’s throne in 1135, outmanouevring both his own elder brother Theobald and the rightful heir, Henry’s daughter the Empress Matilda. He seized the Treasury, crowned himself, gave Cumbria to the Scots to buy them off, paid Danegeld to appease the Danes and then plunged Britain into a series of four civil wars between 1138 and 1154. These left the country ravaged, impoverished and weaker than at any other time before or since.”

Anyone who has watched the British TV series, Cadfael, or read the books by Ellis Peters which are set in these civil wars, will have some idea of the privations of the period.

Andrew Roberts is right too when he says Britain is passing through a golden age during the reign of Elizabeth II. Let us hope she will soon be served by better politicians than now and for the rest of her time among us.