‘King Charles did not colonise Australia. But who else can they complain to?’

I am very sorry that in 1816 my great-great-great-great grandfather stole a sheep.

The only excuse is that he was a labourer with a wife and three children, mechanisation had arrived at the same time as solar flares which destroyed the crops, and they were all starving. That may be why he further stole, from the same farmer, three bushels of oats.

Unfortunately, he decided to set up a small business and stole 14 chickens for resale, and then 11 lambs from, of all people, the parish constables. They took it amiss that so many of their Sunday lunches had gone astray, hunted down the miscreant and had him sentenced to death.

Luckily for this Georgian version of Del Boy Trotter, it was commuted to 14 years of transportation, and once in New South Wales he did a term of indentured labour, had a second wife and family, and then would you believe it became a policeman.

What happened to that long-ago petty criminal still has relevance. I can’t see a field of sheep without salivating, and Australia’s indigenous population has never forgiven Britain for despoiling their land and their country.

Yesterday Lidia Thorpe, the first indigenous Australian to be elected a senator, heckled King Charles after he gave a speech in their Parliament, calling him “not my king” and a “genocidalist”. She wanted treaties with the former aggressor, and to have back the bones of Aboriginal people taken away by the colonisers. “This is not your land,” she said, before being led away to a storm of criticism.

She’s not unused to it, having previously smeared fake blood on a coat of arms following the death of the late Queen. And she’s also not wrong, while at the same time not being entirely right.

She’s a citizen of Australia and he’s the head of state, so he is her king, like it or not. He hasn’t killed anyone that we know of, bones of her people were stolen for “anthropological study”, and technically speaking it’s nobody’s land. Even indigenous people consider themselves caretakers, not landowners. And what to do about it is also a bit of a mess.

Pretty much everyone, with the possible exception of Jacob Rees-Mogg, agrees that the British Empire had some appalling habits: slavery, theft, subjugation, destruction of cultures to name just a few.

But all of history is a bloody, brutal mess. War, genocides, invasion and conquest has been the way of things for millennia, and it’s only really in the past 30 years that the richer, whiter bits of the world have decided they’re against it.

But the Chinese are pro-genocide, if you ask the Uighuyrs; Russia is pro-invasion, if you ask the Ukrainians. You can see it too in Armenia, Gaza, in ethnic Kurdish populations, Myanmar, and a host of other places. These are not habits humanity has been able to break.

And we did not just send prisoners to Australia. We exported disease, alcoholism, and racism. We sent orphans to be abused, we forcibly relocated people so we could set off a dozen atomic bombs, and we conducted almost 600 radioactive experiments so toxic the Outback will need scientific monitoring for a million years. Lidia’s right: we have much to apologise for.

But King Charles is not responsible for the sins of his forebears, any more than I owe Kent Police 11 lamb bhunas. Even if the loss or gain of that crime was still felt, nothing I could do would make any difference to the fact there’s not enough coppers, courts, or prison places.

Yet my family have not had 200 years of mistreatment as a result. We have not been visibly kept apart from others in the land where we live, and if we wanted to raise an issue our voices would be heard, without our having to heckle a Royal.

The Boniface criminal history does not affect our daily lives in the way that colonialism still impacts an indigenous person in Australia, Canada, Africa or the Pacific: the abusive paternalism, the exploitation, the constant need to be kept in your place. It’s more pernicious, for Lidia, and in her shoes I’d be spitting tacks too.

But there is no way to unpick it. History is one long atrocity, human upon human, since we crawled out of the swamp. All we can do is turn our backs on it, and the challenge now for Keir Starmer and King Charles is how they choose to do so.

There’s a dozen Commonwealth nations urging the Prime Minister for reparations, and a series of engagements involving original Australians for the King. There will be questions about the real pain, real harm, genuine suffering that continues today, overseen by governments that want to spend as little as possible on brown people a long way away.

Some things we have already given are priceless – like the right of an indigenous person to be elected senator, for instance, a vast difference from the days when they were counted on the census as livestock. We caused the problem but we also helped to end it, which means this should be fixable.

Real reparations are preferential trade deals with Commonwealth nations, better education about empire, greater kindness and time to hear those who’ve still got a beef. Visa schemes for inward and outward training, business and migration, constitutional support, and other vague-sounding but more effective solutions than merely writing a cheque.

It’s all a bit woke, though, isn’t it? A bit why-should-we-apologise. And there’s the real conflict – everybody wants to turn their back, but some people want to ignore it rather than acknowledge it. And we have a Tory frontbench straight outta Trumpton, determined to end human rights for our own citizens, in order to punish those in need of them.

If there is a positive to the British Empire, it is the spread of many of our legal protections across a third of the planet’s surface, giving us a reputation for fairness that has done a lot to eclipse our old one. And we risk losing it, if we don’t strive to be fair.

Humans struggle a little too much with the idea of being humane. But it is simple enough to say: let’s be friends. And that’s all Keir and Charles need to do. We cannot undo the crimes of the past, but there is no better policeman than a repentant ex-crim. Britain should acknowledge its history, then show a better form of humanity.