The medieval monarchy is a succession of brutes and fools, with the occasional foolish brute and one or two ruthlessly efficient tyrants. He was spectacularly unsuccessful, inheriting England, Ireland and most of France but then losing control of almost all of it within two decades. In 2023, we flatter ourselves that we no longer put foes’ eyes out with swords or die of bubonic plague, and that the NHS, universal suffrage, widespread literacy, CBT, social media and increased life expectancy make us different from the toxic wingnuts who predominate in Mitchell’s book.

It would be entirely inappropriate if today’s constitutional monarchy – which is there as a picturesque reminder of our action-packed past, of the wrong-headed chaos the country emerged from – didn’t faintly reflect that. It’s a tale of narcissists, inadequate self-control, excessive beheadings, middle-management insurrection, uncivil wars, and at least one total Cnut, as the population evolved from having their crops nicked by the thug with the largest armed gang to bowing and paying taxes to a divinely anointed king. A funny book about a serious subject, UNRULY is for anyone who has ever wondered how we got here – and who is to blame. Nobody’s quite sure of the number and it’s not clear whether that fact has been lost in the intervening centuries or whether the king himself didn’t know.Mitchell doubts, for instance, that Henry II actually said: “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?

Intriguingly, Mitchell doesn’t tee up the sequel but argues rather that this is the natural end to his story since afterwards kings and queens were less central to England’s story.Throughout the middle ages, our rulers supposedly had the endorsement of God, which made their failures all the more humiliating. So, when King Henry I died 15 years later, Stephen’s path to kingship had been cleared by diarrhoea. But the real nightmare was when they seemed briefly to succeed, as happened under Edward III and Henry V. BBC One), the host of The Unbelievable Truth on Radio 4 and one of the Observer's most popular columnists. He hurried to Westminster and got himself crowned, then had one of the most unsuccessful reigns in English history, entirely dominated by a savage civil war.

Taking us back to King Arthur (spoiler: he didn’t exist), Mitchell tells the founding story of post-Roman England up to the reign of Elizabeth I (spoiler: she dies). He might particularly enjoy reading this passage about why it’s unnecessary to decide between the awfulness of King Stephen and Queen Matilda: “They were both twats.Perhaps this is how history should be done: not by patient scholars, but by free-swearing actor-comedians cramming more ideas and jokes into their pages than many professionals have committed to print in their careers. They went so far as to claim that they were in fact the rightful kings of France despite all the evidence to the contrary and repeatedly threw all their resources into mounting military expeditions to ruin the lives of thousands of innocent French residents which achieved, in even the medium term, precisely nothing. All the mouldering bones of their hundreds of dead relatives, clustered at Westminster and Windsor but also dotted all over the place – Gloucester, Worcester, Reading, various places in Normandy, that car park in Leicester – must all be revolving with such vigour that, as a subterranean energy source, it represents a viable alternative to fracking. For this city break, he took 24 outfits, had 12 packhorses to carry his silver dinner service, eight wagons of baggage and horses with monkeys riding on them.