At a parliamentary committee on Tuesday, Nick Clegg said that if the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were to have a first-born girl, she would succeed to the throne in preference to any subsequent brothers. This rule would apply even if the proposed law to change the succession had not yet been passed. The reason for this, according to the Deputy Prime Minister, is that the change was agreed last October at a meeting of Commonwealth prime ministers in Perth in Australia. This was an extraordinary thing to say, because it is not, constitutionally, true. The succession is a matter of law, not of the generally expressed preference of political big-wigs, and until it is changed by law, it has not changed. The atmosphere at the committee was all giggly on the subject, but history shows that an unsettled succession can cause war. The Diamond Jubilee celebrated next week is a pretty strong reminder of the value of getting it right. Yet the Queen’s present government does not even know the rules, or perhaps just does not care about them.
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Peerages have often been sold. Orders of chivalry have their placemen. But the Order of Merit, for reasons I do not quite understand, is uncorrupted. It is, as its name suggests, meritocratic. At any one time, roughly three quarters of its maximum of 24 members deserve it. Few more so than John Howard, the former four-times Prime Minister of Australia, who is in London next week to receive his OM from the Queen. He is the best living role model of how to be a conservative leader in the modern world — better, in this respect, even than Mrs Thatcher, because her extremely emphatic form of leadership does not suit the idiom of informality which governs everything in the 21st-century West.
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