How I learned to love the Lords

Lost Pines, Texas

When I first moved to America in the early 1990s I arrived as a republican, full of a furious rhetoric about the end of monarchy and the abolition of hereditary privilege. I’d sent a hefty donation to Charter 88, who wanted to see PR, a written constitution and an elected second house. Social justice could not be improved by traditional methods and all the Lords Temporal were good for was raising prize pigs and holding the hands of serial killers whom they visited in jug. The Lords Spiritual were the symbol of an Anglicanism reduced to giving a home to the WI and holding the odd carol service on Christmas Eve.

While some decent old buffer might still be heard speaking up for fair play and moderation and could understand what some other decent old buffer meant when he quoted Pliny the Elder, it was definitely time for a change. We needed deputies not dukes; senators rather than the sons of chaps whose ancestors had given their names to whiskers, fast food, overcoats, hats and sturdy gumboots. The honours system was shot through with corruption and political preferments, and a form of senile dementia gripped the Crown and those who represented it. My letters to the US political weeklies and the local papers spoke up for the faith of the Founding Fathers and their impatience with a unified church and state or a monarch convinced that only God could make a ruler or a tree — and who was somewhat confused about whether he was one or the other or both. Functioning democracy, I was sure, could not be furthered by the continuing presence of either a royal family or an unelected second chamber. Much better to have a constitution supported by a Congress in office entirely because people had voted to put them there, who properly reflected the opinions of the electorate.