Queen Elizabeth: Scottish Green councillor Alys Mumford went full Monty Python about republican protests – John McLellan

Thank goodness for the Green Party. If it didn’t exist, something to give the rest of us a measurement of self-satisfied moral superiority against which we can all feel so humbly judged would need to be invented.

A chainmail-clad John Cleese reads a newspaper while Graham Chapman smokes a quiet pipe on the set of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Picture: John Downing/Express/Getty Images)

It could be calibrated like earthquakes – say the Harvie Scale – at which one would be slightly smug, progressing geometrically to ten, a level of holiness to which even the Pope could only aspire.

For them, leader Patrick Harvie’s speech to King Charles for the Scottish Parliament’s motion of condolence was relatively restrained, perhaps just a two or three, but honour was restored by new Green councillor Alys Mumford, summoning her inner Monty Python at last week’s special Edinburgh Council meeting.

She pledged “love and solidarity” to anyone “alienated” or “disconnected” by the Edinburgh ceremonies for the late Queen, and for those who “do not see cause for celebration of the past 70 years”.

Bemoaning the “suppression of protest”, she argued that questioning institutions should be “free from the threat of oppression”.

At least an eight on the Harvie Scale, I’d say, but then again perhaps it should be an inalienable right for attention-seeking narcissists to get in the faces of mourners paying respects.

“Help, help, we’re being oppressed,” shouted Michael Palin in The Holy Grail. “Come and see the violence inherent in the system.” Who knew we were living it?

And did her Greens colleague, Councillor Susan Rae, convey the message when she dutifully represented her party at last week’s official events?