The Palace letters. 

When the monarch is a figurehead at home*, but the monarch's representative can remove an elected political leader of another country.

Kerr was not only the Queen’s man, he had longstanding ties to Anglo-American intelligence. He was an enthusiastic member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, described by Jonathan Kwitny of the Wall Street Journal in his book, The Crimes of Patriots, as “an elite, invitation-only group … exposed in Congress as being founded, funded and generally run by the CIA”. The CIA “paid for Kerr’s travel, built his prestige … Kerr continued to go to the CIA for money”.

When Whitlam was re-elected for a second term, in 1974, the White House sent Marshall Green to Canberra as ambassador. Green was an imperious, sinister figure who worked in the shadows of America’s “deep state”. Known as “the coupmaster”, he had played a central role in the 1965 coup against President Sukarno in Indonesia – which cost up to a million lives. One of his first speeches in Australia, to the Australian Institute of Directors, was described by an alarmed member of the audience as “an incitement to the country’s business leaders to rise against the government”.

The Americans and British worked together. In 1975, Whitlam discovered that Britain’s MI6 was operating against his government. “The Brits were actually decoding secret messages coming into my foreign affairs office,” he said later. One of his ministers, Clyde Cameron, told me, “We knew MI6 was bugging cabinet meetings for the Americans.” In the 1980s, senior CIA officers revealed that the “Whitlam problem” had been discussed “with urgency” by the CIA’s director, William Colby, and the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield. A deputy director of the CIA said: “Kerr did what he was told to do.”

*"Queen's Consent"

More than 1,000 laws have been vetted by the Queen or Prince Charles through a secretive procedure before they were approved by the UK’s elected members of parliament, the Guardian has established.

The huge number of laws subject to royal vetting cover matters ranging from justice, social security, pensions, race relations and food policy through to obscure rules on car parking charges and hovercraft.

They included draft laws that affected the Queen’s personal property such as her private estates in Balmoral and Sandringham, and potentially anything deemed to affect her personally.

The Guardian has compiled a database of at least 1,062 parliamentary bills that have been subjected to Queen’s consent, stretching from the beginning of Elizabeth II’s reign through to the present day.

I don't pay that much attention to these things. If I had I'd have been less glib. 

I may come back to this tomorrow when I'm sober.