The King and Queen at the at the balcony of Buckingham Palace after coronation service on May 6 2023 [HM Government / Open Government Licence 3]

A PAMPHLET by Tom Paine, a corset-maker’s son from Norfolk, changed the world. He had fallen foul of the British state for his politics and so headed to America where he became the voice of the Revolution.

His book Common Sense dismantled the idea of a hereditary head of state, his quill calling for independence, the end to slavery, and a written constitution to set out rules of a just society living in peace. After helping forge the nascent US democracy, he went to France to do the same.

For all of Paine’s brilliance in deconstructing the idea of a monarchy, 300 years on we’re still burdened by this same constitutional idiocy. Graham Smith’s book, Abolish The Monarchy, feels like a long-awaited sequel.

The story begins with that well-peddled line by Monarchists that it is “good” for tourism. This is untrue in terms of economic figures and Smith, who is the head of the campaign group Republic, asks a more fundamental question: If the system was a moneyspinner, should we have a hereditary head of state because it is good for tourism?

What a strange way to organise a society. If so, it follows the US should appoint a Disney character to the White House in perpetuity.

VisitBritain, the tourist office, trumpeted claims that the monarchy was worth £500m each year. Not true, proves Smith. The figure was reached by adding up ticket sales to heritage sites. For example, St Paul’s Cathedral. “Surely they weren’t suggesting tourists visited St Paul’s because the royals held a wedding there three decades earlier?” he says. VisitBritain backtracked and agreed it was nonsense.

“In truth, £500m in the context of the British economy, is almost nothing. Using pre-pandemic statistics, the tourism industry bought in £127billion,” he adds. “The incorrect figure, thrown about to somehow justify a corrupt and rotten edifice, would be just 0.3 per cent of all tourism revenue and under 0.01 per cent of the total economy.”

He asks for reasons why they should remain in place – and finds a paucity of intellectual responses. “It is a curious feature of debates that incidental benefits are the first line of defence – tourism, charities – but none of this stands up,” he says.

“It should alarm true believers to see these incidental collateral benefits being trumpeted as powerful arguments because it tells us a lot about how little people care about the more substantial purpose of the institution.

“To defend it on the grounds that we would suffer an economic downturn in the event of its abolition is to reduce it to a kind of life raft.

“But it is an illusion. If we look at what is driving our economy, we will see our country stands on its own two feet, sustaining our culture, tourism and charity sector without help from the monarchy.”

Smith shines a light on the myth of the “hard- working” royal. “What the royals do does not amount to work as most people understand it, and they do far less than those superficially impressive figures suggest,” he writes.

Prince Charles’s former press officer Mark Bolland admitted: “The Windsors are very good at ‘working’ three days a week for five months of the year and making it look as if they work hard.”

Charles, who at the time of writing the book was increasingly a stand-in for the Queen, would be expected to be a lot busier, which he was, “to a point,” adds Smith. “But by a lot busier I do not mean busy. At no point does he do a full week, or even a full day. At a gener­ous estimate, the average length of an engagement is an hour, but many are far shorter,” he says.

“If we assume they’re each an hour long, then during the whole of 2021 Charles did the equivalent of 11 weeks’ full-time work – an average of four-and-a-half days a month. And when they say work, it bears no resemblance to what the word means in real life.”

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Then there is the cost. Remember the outcry over the MPs’ expenses scandal? “Yet when a member of the Royal Family is found to have spent not thousands, but millions of pounds of public money on second, third and fourth homes, these same people remain silent,” Smith says.

Research states the cost to the tax payer is around £345m a year – enough to fund 13,000 new teachers or nurses. “Is money is being spent effectively or ethically, and what else it might be spent on?” he asks.

King Charles lives in half a dozen palatial homes, travels between those homes by helicopter and relies on a staff of 500.The £345m a year of public money is for their own travel, bloated security and unaccountable official costs, while at the same time leaving other public bodies picking up the tab for engagements.

The Royal Family is simply one of the longest-running continuous scams played on one of the largest numbers of people in history. Graham Smith’s book should be read by everyone who thinks having them in situ is a good idea.

• Abolish the Monarchy: Why We Should and How We Will. By Graham Smith Penguin, £16.99