While bombs were being dropped by Israeli planes on Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp, ostensibly to "destroy" the "terrorist Hamas", Charles and Camilla were enjoying their royal visit to Kenya. Or maybe not, since Charles was obliged to acknowledge "the wrongdoings of the past" as "a cause of the greatest sorrow and the deepest regret". What he is referring to, of course, are the atrocities committed by his mother's regime against the Kenyan freedom struggle by the Mau Mau, in the years 1952-1960.

    Then again, these wrong-doings are hardly all over: much of Kenya's prime land and agri-business remains in British hands. But up until very recently, the record of these British atrocities was covered up. The first independence president, Kenyatta, inaugurated by the British in 1963, helped sweep this - and Kenyans' history of courageous anti-colonial struggle - under the carpet, claiming that "Mau Mau was a disease which was eradicated and must never be remembered again".

    However, Kenyans who know this history, including the oldest man in the world, 117-year old former Mau Mau "terrorist" Samwel Nthigai Mburia, are well able to draw a parallel with the bombing by 10 British RAF Harvard bombers and 4 heavy Lincolns, of Mau Mau fighters hiding deep in Kenya's forests in 1955 - and the Israeli bombing of Gaza "to eradicate Hamas".

    The Mau Mau, when caught by the British authorities were hanged, tortured, castrated, suspended upside down and beaten to death. When their Uhuru struggle finally ended, up to 320,000 were sent to concentration camps with their families, where they were subjected to forced labour, starvation, further torture, rape and murder. British authorities also herded Kikuyu women and children into 800 heavily-patrolled, enclosed villages, dispersed across the countryside and cordoned off by barbed wire, spiked trenches and watchtowers.

    Does that sound familiar? It will to the Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza, "heavily patrolled" on the West Bank and the 6,000 (including juveniles) in Israeli jails whose repression is overseen and backed by the US and British modern colonial - aka, imperialist - states.

    Netanyahu uses the same language as Kenyatta - who learnt his words from the British authorities: terrorists must be eradicated like vermin. This week, in Kenya, Charles presented former "vermin" Samwel Nthigai Mburia with a medal to replace the one he was "awarded" after fighting for Britain in WW2 - which he, like other veterans, had thrown away in disgust...

    Today the "wrongdoings" of imperialism and its proxy, the Netanyahu government of Israel, continue. And "King" Charles, as Sunak's and Starmer's rather rickety and tarnished figurehead, doesn't dare to apologise for any of it.