IF YOU HAVE your home in London, it sort of goes with the territory that you dream of the day when you might live like the royals just down the road. Alas, my wife and I took a look at our bank account and decided we can't afford it. We aren't poor enough.

At least, that's the conclusion we reached after the suggestion by the government's troll-like Cabinet Office minister, Mo Mowlam, that Queen Elizabeth and her kinfolk be kicked out of Buckingham Palace and told to seek more "modern" - and presumably less expensive - digs elsewhere.

Actually, what the lady said was that "if people want a monarch of the new century, they should have a palace of the new century, in line with the architecture you see around London."

If I were the queen and thought for one tick of Big Ben of taking that suggestion seriously, I should pack up the royal tiara and scepter, the family tea service, Prince Philip and the queen's own corgis, and hie myself to more salubrious climes where Mo Mowlams are merely the nightmarish result of a badly digested bit of lobster thermidor.

In truth, London is to modern architecture what Hannibal Lecter is to gourmet dining. Its latest examples of the genre include the Millennium Dome (which looks like a giant, 12-legged white cockroach turned on its back) and the Millennium Bridge (a cross-Thames walkway that was closed two days after it opened because its swaying had pedestrians frantically calling for barf bags).

An earlier bit of designer architecture was the "high-tech modern" Lloyds Building, with all its plumbing and heating conduits tacked onto the exterior - a stainless steel version of the sort of thing you would get if you built a human being with all its guts and other innards hanging on the outside.

And there was the dread-awful modernist extension that exalted architects planned for the National Gallery. That idea was stillborn and flushed after Prince Charles described it as "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend." His audience at the Royal Society of Architects sat suitably unamused.

If what Mo Mowlam has in mind for the royals is a typical London council home (to be right down there among "her people," you see), then the queen should keep on trucking through those boarding gates to the jetliner. When it comes to housing standards, much of London owes more to the 19th century than to the 20th, let alone the 21st.

The British have yet to master the intricacies of air conditioning and central heating, with the result that the former works best around Christmas and the latter is in top working order on Midsummer's Eve. Many toilets still operate on the chain-pull principle, but at least the crapper is no longer a tiny shed on the far side of the garden.

Council housing is, in short, largely the preserve of those who can afford no better. It's hard to picture the Windsors taking heartily to a life amid graffiti-riddled walls, dining on jellied eels and steak and kidney pie, and trotting down to the local pub for a pint and a game of darts or shove ha'penny.

London also has a wealth (if that's the word) of high-rise apartment-style housing, much of it built in the 1950s and 1960s by architects obviously trained at the Stalin Institute of Monolithic Building Block Design. It serves a useful purpose today as TV entertainment, fodder for demolition experts out to prove it's possible to bring down an entire tower block in one blast without disturbing the beer on the pub bar a drunk's stagger away.

Mowlam's "get thee to a council house" approach comes on the heels of Gordon Brown's giving Queen Elizabeth the heave-ho from her yacht, the Britannia, by closing it down. Brown is Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British version of treasury secretary), and as such is also moving apace to freeze the queen's annual pay.

This is all part and parcel of Prime Minister Tony Blair's plan for "Cool Britannia," a thoroughly 21st century nation with a modern capital he feels is befitting one of the major cities of the world.

In fact, Blair's government seems blissfully unaware of the unpleasant consequences of biting the hand that feeds it. Americans, and Japanese and the French and the rest, don't come here to spend dollars and yen and francs by the billions to take photos of themselves standing in front of the towering infernals of "Cool Britannia's" architects.

Americans already have the World Trade Center and the Sears Building and Trump Tower, and I suggest they aren't jamming themselves into flying sardine cans, and risking ptomaine from the corpse-cold slabs of beef and chicken that pass for airline food, over thousands of miles of the Atlantic to see how Britons can build the same things, except worse.

Tourists come in their millions not to see Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia," but to see and taste and listen to "Rule Britannia," with the Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London, the crypts of a thousand years of kings and queens and occasional knaves at Westminster Abbey, and the Trooping of the Colors.

The prime minister himself has insisted he is an "ardent monarchist" and has, in effect, told Mo Mowlam to put a sock in it. But the actions of his "New Labor" acolytes - the refusal of his wife to curtsey to the queen (not done in America, perhaps, but just good manners in Britain), government "spin doctor" Alastair Campbell's description of the royal family as "thick," and Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott's description of himself as "a republican in the democratic sense" - hint of a different reality.

Still, according to a recent poll, 90 percent of Britain's citizens are firmly in the monarchist camp. The remaining 10 percent would do well to remember that the last - and only - time Britain was a republic lasted less than two decades, and its leader wound up with his head stuck on a spike atop Westminster Hall.

Meanwhile, Americans and the rest come to London to see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. And they expect Queen Elizabeth to be puttering about inside, doing those majestic magical things that kings and queens of England have done for centuries.

Thought for the Day: The only time the world beats a path to your door is when you're in the bathroom.

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