Like you and me, whether she wants to be or not, the Queen is a citizen of the European Union.

As far as our rulers in Brussels are concerned, Her Majesty can stand for the European Parliament and vote in the elections for it. She doesn’t, but she could.

She may claim to be ‘By the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith’ but in the eyes of the EU (which doesn’t believe in God or Faith) she’s just Citizen Liz.

Scroll down for video

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, President Joachim Gauck and his partner Daniela Schadt. German Foregin Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier shakes hands with the President before a banquet

Under EU law (Article 20, Paragraph Two of the Treaty of Rome, since you ask), she is ‘subject to the duties’ which the EU decides to require of its citizens. There aren’t any yet. But I can promise you that there will be as ‘ever closer union’ plods steadily on.

When this country was still independent, the Queen was the one who had subjects. Now, she is subject to others. Forget the Coronation Oath and a thousand years of the British constitution. Our sovereign is someone else’s subject.

Can she, in that case, still be our sovereign?

I wonder if she has noticed this change, or been worried by it. I suspect not. It has just happened to her, as it has happened to everyone else. We have quietly become a different people in a different country.

Like most of us, she has probably heard the slow advance of the EU into our national life as background noise, a dreary constant swoosh, like distant traffic.

Buckingham Palace insists, against all the evidence, that Her Majesty’s EU citizenship ‘in no way affects her prerogatives, rights and responsibilities as the Sovereign and Head of State.’ Given that the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg is the final arbiter of law in this country now, and that Parliament and our so-called ‘Supreme Court’ are subject to it, that simply isn’t so.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth and Berlin's Mayor Michael Mueller speak to wellwishers on Pariser Platz in Berlin

This sort of thing may appear mystical but actually it matters. It’s why armies defend their standards to the end, why we have Royal symbols on state documents, postage stamps, the cap-badges of soldiers and policemen, coins and seals.

The EU’s leaders know it matters. That’s why they made her an EU citizen. And how pleased they must have been to hear her, in Berlin on Wednesday, trotting out their standard propaganda line that ‘division’ in Europe is a bad thing and that ‘unity’ is the source of safety.

Really? For centuries, it was firm British policy to keep the Continent divided, to make sure its great powers left us alone. The safest period of my lifetime was the Cold War, when Europe was more sharply divided than ever.

As she spoke, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, nodded enthusiastically. And if Mrs Merkel thought the Queen was making a political point, I’d back her judgment against any statements or briefings from British officials.

Could Downing Street, the Foreign Office and Buckingham Palace have imagined for a second that such a speech would not be interpreted as an endorsement of Britain’s continued EU membership?

Yet all would have seen it in advance and the Government could have stopped it if they wanted.

They didn’t. Without doubt, the Queen’s personal acceptance of her role as a loyal EU servant was one of the great symbolic moments of our history. A bit like Magna Carta, but backwards.

Farewell to the ultimate Englishman

I'm not sure I have ever enjoyed anything on TV as much as I liked watching Patrick Macnee playing John Steed in The Avengers, especially when Diana Rigg was at his side.

Here was an Englishman - funny, chivalrous, fundamentally gentle, yet deadly to his enemies.

From his obituaries, I gather that he was really like that. What a pleasant change it makes from all those actors, famous for playing noble roles, who turn out to have been secretly mean and nasty.

Real gentleman: Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee in The Avengers in 1965. What a pleasant change to hear that people genuinely did see him as a gentleman and it wasn't purely an act

Crazed killers: The clue everyone ignores

When I lived in the suburbs of Washington DC, I was rather proud that my landlord was almost the only African-American in my unofficially segregated neighbourhood (the other one was the adopted child of our admirable next-door neighbours).

Like many American houses, ours had a small flagpole over the front door, normally used for the Stars And Stripes.

I asked the owner if he’d object if I flew a Union Jack from it.

‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘You can fly any flag you like there, from anywhere in the world, as long as it isn’t the Confederate Battle Flag.’

For him, it was a nasty symbol of cruelty and hate.

From then on, I always took seriously the arguments of those who said the Confederate banner was a real issue, not just a bit of nostalgia.

And if it no longer flies in the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol, I for one won’t be grieving. It’s one good effect of the Charleston massacre.

But what a pity that this dispiriting event has not led to any examination of the role of legal and illegal mind-altering drugs in rampage killings, an issue which is in my view much more pressing.

It’s still going on. Authority doesn’t look or doesn’t care. Two and two are not put together.

The Charleston suspect, as I’ve pointed out, appears to have been a drug abuser.

Now we have another – British – case which ought to have made people think, but hasn’t.

The gruesome murder of the blameless 82-year-old mother and grandmother, Palmira Silva (her killer cut her head off), received less coverage than it should have. But it had much in common with two other recent crimes – the murder of Lee Rigby in 2011 by two obviously crazed men in London and the beheading of Jennifer Mills-Westley in Tenerife in 2011, also by a crazed individual.

All these killers had one thing in common – heavy cannabis use.

The frightful injuries they inflicted on their victims were signs that they were not sane.

The killer’s cannabis use was, in all cases, reported as a footnote or a side-issue. What if it is a cause?

But we will never find out if we do not look or ask.

There are no car chases or sex scenes in the interesting new film Mr Holmes. Instead, we see the great detective living out his final lonely years as a pottering beekeeper, played by Sir Ian McKellen in a silk top hat, left. It’s a quiet, rather kind story full of thought. And it contains one heartfelt line from Holmes, who complains passionately that in real life, logic is very rare. So it is, and it is his steely attachment to reason and facts, while all about him jump to conclusions, that makes Holmes live on from age to age, in a hundred different incarnations.