Princess Antoinette Fernandez, a woman with a royal name if ever there was one, is the daughter of Her Royal Highness Abiola Dosunmu, the queen mother of Lagos in West Africa.
Through no fault of her own, she is descended from the Obas or kings of Lagos – now the commercial capital of Nigeria – who built their vast wealth on the proceeds of slavery.
With breath-taking hypocrisy, Princess Antoinette is also the Green Party's spokesman for slavery reparations. She campaigns for Britain to make a formal apology for its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and to pay unimaginable sums in compensation.
The money being demanded from the UK is beyond the realms of fantasy.
A report compiled for the University of the West Indies by the Brattle Group, a US consultancy, came up with the figure of £19.7 trillion. That's equivalent to 14 times our total Government budget, six years of GDP, or more than £280,000 for every person in the country.
It's a ludicrous, mendacious demand. The fact that the woman leading the charge for the Greens is the descendant of African slavers herself underlies the sickening opportunism of it all.
Yet Andy Burnham, describing Britain in the Guardian last week as 'a country that participated in the trade in human lives', appears willing to pander to these outrageous claims. He said he was 'open… to calls for a formal apology'.
Apologising to countries that indulged in slavery themselves would be morally obscene. Apologising to countries that still practise slavery would be even worse. Yet Nigeria, along with India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (all members of the Commonwealth) account for about a third of the world's 50 million enslaved people today.
The money being demanded from the UK for slavery reparations is beyond the realms of fantasy, writes Professor Doug Stokes. King Charles is currently on an official tour of the Caribbean. He is seen greeting the guards of honour in Nassau, The Bahamas
That figure, according to the Global Estimates of Modern Slavery report, includes 28 million in forced labour and 22 million women in forced marriages.
These countries signed a declaration this year describing slavery as the worst sin imaginable. At the same time, they are perpetuating the misery of slavery for far more people than were transported to the Americas – about 9.3 million, according to the Brattle Report.
The transatlantic slave trade was an abomination. In sheer weight of numbers, though, it is far exceeded by the numbers currently enslaved by countries demanding reparations from Britain.
Mr Burnham is gripped by what I call the 'atonement complex'. He appears to believe that our country's prosperity was built on the back of slavery.
But that notion doesn't match the complex reality. It's true that a comparatively small number of British businessmen, such as the Bristol merchant Edward Colston (whose statue ended up in the harbour in 2020), did profit hugely. The nation as a whole did not.
Reparations campaigners argue that the UK was made rich by slavery, that the wealth is still here, and that the white majority are collectively guilty and must pay. But the evidence for this aggressive pretence does not exist.
Analysis shows that, at most, the country experienced about a decade's-worth of extra growth in terms of income per head, a fillip largely confined to regions such as the PM's beloved Manchester, thanks to its cotton mills.
This is a far cry from being the foundation of Britain's wealth. Our comparative prosperity was rooted in the innovation and industry of the whole population over centuries.
Families who did benefit directly from slavery, such as the Bertrams in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, owed their wealth to the sugar plantations. Sugar did little for the factories that were the real engine of our prosperity: as the economic historian Joel Mokyr remarked, without slavery Britain 'would have had to drink bitter tea, but it still would have had an Industrial Revolution'.
Other economists have pointed out that, if the slave trade really was the basis for Western wealth, Portugal ought to be the richest country in Europe. Its ships transported nearly two-thirds more Africans than British vessels.
It should also be said that, horrific though the voyages across the Atlantic certainly were and hideous the conditions of the slaves who survived to work their lives away in the Americas, the Africa they were leaving was no Garden of Eden. The continent was characterised by tribal warfare and genocide, as well as endemic slavery.
Ending slavery cost Britain far more than it profited from the trade. The demands for reparations amount to nothing more than an attempt at blackmail, writes Professor Doug Stokes
Britain differed from them all in the most crucial of ways.
Slavery was never legal on these islands, and we led the fight to end the trade, outlawing it in 1807. The following year, the Royal Navy formed the West Africa Squadron, tasked with forcing other nations to accept abolition.
The cost of this is put at 1.8 per cent of national income for 60 years. This figure can be debated, but it has been called the most expensive moral action in history. About 1,600 ships were intercepted during those years and more than 150,000 Africans were liberated. But the men who sailed the ships paid a terrible price. An estimated 1,600 died on service, most of them from disease.
Ending slavery cost Britain far more than it profited from the trade. The demands for reparations amount to nothing more than an attempt at blackmail. If we were foolish enough to offer money in compensation, we would be beset by ever more claims – the inevitable consequence of trying to pay off a blackmailer.
What is to be done? Firstly, the Treasury should publish the full cost of suppressing the slave trade and subsequent emancipation. Do that, and the next minister invited to negotiate will know what has already been paid.
Secondly, tell the whole story. Britain's schools and museums educate us about the slave trade, but they should also teach the story of its ending. The current hand-wringing is patronising to non-Western nations, which are reduced to a form of childlike innocence.
Thirdly, the Government must challenge every nation that practises domestic slavery today. If anyone is to pay reparations, it is those countries. They include China, where at least three million Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim minorities are enslaved, and Myanmar, where more than 650,000 people are believed to live in slavery.
Britain must always refuse to accept liability for a trade it spent 60 years and thousands of lives suppressing. Andy Burnham should say as much to every hypocritical opportunist who tries to squeeze money out of us.
Doug Stokes is Professor of International Relations at Modul University, Vienna, and author of The Atonement Complex, published this week by the Institute of Economic Affairs.