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. John Howard is the embodiment of the democratic ideal of the common man with uncommon abilities. His ideological tenacity is married to his common sense, the best combination. As a result, his country, even under its current management, is better placed than any other in the Anglosphere to weather the economic storms caused by bad ideology and no common sense whatever.
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‘If the common currency disintegrates,’ intoned the Financial Times last week, ‘it will be because monetary union and national responsibility for banks are an unsustainable combination. Policy-makers understand this now.’ Yes, but why didn’t they understand it before they started down this track, and why didn’t the omniscient FT warn them? The answer, I think, is that warnings about EMU were seen as ‘right-wing’ and were therefore disregarded. In his new memoir, Confessions of a Eurosceptic, David Heathcoat-Amory describes frustrating conversations with his then boss at the treasury, Kenneth Clarke. Clarke would never engage with the arguments about what the single currency entailed. He would simply warn that, if the project did not press ahead, ‘right-wingers’ would win. One of the hardest lessons of the crisis for European elites is simple: even the right can be right.
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Famously (the story is sourced in Stephen Wall’s excellent A Stranger in Europe), the founders of what is now the European Union advised doubting British diplomats to ‘enjoy the music and not worry about the words’. As the current crisis intensifies, I am following this advice. I am not listening to the words about fiscal union, Eurobonds and firewalls, but to the music. It is not the ‘Ode to Joy’, but Gotterdammerung.
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Last week, we sat in All Saints, Lydd — ‘the cathedral of the marsh’ — and voted in favour of toilets. We were marking the 30th anniversary of the Romney Marsh Churches Trust, of which I am a vice-president. Before we settled down to a resonant address by the Bishop of London, a resolution was moved that the constitution of the society should be changed. Up till now, we have permitted ourselves only to help restore existing fabric, but now, it was proposed, we should also authorise ourselves to give money for improvements and alterations, including kitchens and lavatories. I was interested and surprised to see that no one, including myself, voted against the change. Until recently, I would have thundered against toilets, and I still think it sad that so few people in Britain dare venture anywhere unless they are guaranteed ‘facilities’ at all times. But I have changed my mind because of a strongly observable fact about modern rural English life. Wretched planning laws make it almost impossible to put up new communal buildings, while at the same time most villages have a surplus of old ones (churches). The church authorities — the diocese of London is a rare exception — long to close them down. This should hardly ever happen. They should be used not only for Anglicans, but for all sane Christian worship (including non-conformists, Catholics etc, who could help share costs), and for most of the numerous community activities at present squeezed into inadequate village halls. On the marsh, funerals used to be conducted by parsons standing in ‘hudds’ — wooden huts like old telephone boxes designed to protect them from the elements. New hudds should be built, adapted for use as toilets.
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My mother attended the last London Olympics, in 1948, as a schoolgirl, and she has shown me the programme of the closing ceremony which she kept. The ceremony doubled up with the Prix des Nations — the equestrian event — in Wembley Stadium. Lt-Col Harry Llewellyn distinguished himself on Foxhunter, and in those democratic days before rubbish like VIP lanes for the ‘Olympic family’, he came and sat in the crowd, near my mother. The programme includes a rotten song (to the tune of the ‘Londonderry Air’) by A.P. Herbert, who was not nearly so good when not being funny: ‘If all the lands could run with all the others,/ And work as sweetly as the young men play,/ Lose with a laugh, and battle but as brothers,/ Loving to win — but not in every way…’. The most striking thing about the document, unthinkable now, is that it contains not a single advertisement or sponsor.
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