You will have read in every news outlet that the baby whom the Duchess of Cambridge is bearing will be third in line to the throne if she is a girl, because of a new law which equalises the succession of the firstborn between males and females. This is untrue — first because, as the child of the heir to the heir, she will be third in line to the throne under existing law (unless a brother comes along), and secondly because this new law does not exist. All that has happened is that the Commonwealth prime ministers of the 16 countries of which our Queen is Queen agreed in Perth in 2011 that they wanted this change. Under the Statute of Westminster, no change can happen without the legislative agreement of all. They therefore set in train a means of co-ordinating this. By a genuine coincidence, the last consent came through on Monday, just before anyone in government knew about the royal pregnancy. Now there have to be parliamentary processes in all 16 countries. It is no small matter. The new law will also end the prohibition on marrying Roman Catholics, so eight statutes in Britain alone will have to be amended or cross-referenced. In a hereditary system, the law of succession is the key to stability, so any change should not be rushed in order to get a result before the birth. This constitutional reform is being treated like a shotgun marriage. If the bill does not get through in time, and the child is a girl and then acquires a brother (or is a firstborn twin), people will start taking sides about whether she should succeed. The rules by which 16 countries recognise their head of state are being put in play by the demands of ‘equality’. If such equality were truly applied, we would not have primogeniture, or, indeed, a monarchy. This might please Nick Clegg, who is in charge of the new legislation, but why does a Conservative prime minister permit it?
To a moving little ceremony in the council chamber of the BBC to mark Jonathan Dimbleby’s 25 years as chairman of Any Questions? How creaky the corporation looks. Everyone seemed vastly old, not least the chairman, Chris Patten, visibly battered by the recent cares of office. However, he made a witty and naughty speech contrasting Any Questions? favourably with the telly one, Question Time, chaired by Jonathan’s brother, David. He made the point, though he put it more politely, that it is incredibly boring having to listen to the opinions of the audience. Question Time can never quite handle the fact that the crowd cannot be expected, because there are so many of them, to maintain the focus of the conversation. The roving mike picks up a mangy selection of disparate points: the interest drains away. When I listened to Any Questions? as a boy what I liked most was the uninterrupted articulacy of the panels. You could rely on Violet Bonham Carter, Enoch Powell, Tony Benn (present at the Dimbleby celebration), Malcolm Muggeridge, Marghanita Laski, not necessarily — or even often — to talk good sense, but always to talk well.
I felt particularly old myself, because I first appeared on the programme under Jonathan Dimbleby’s predecessor’s predecessor, David Jacobs — in 1984, just after I became editor of this paper. At the dinner beforehand, my fellow panellist, Esther Rantzen, asked me if I had been to Eton and whether it was a good school, because she had written her son down for it. On air, the panel were asked if we would ever send our children to boarding school. Oh no, said Esther, she didn’t believe in ‘delegated parenthood’, she loved her children much too much to part with them. This was my first lesson in how celebrity works. I have a feeling I have told this story in print before — but, there, old people are known to repeat things.
This government sends out mixed signals about its attitude to the poor. It raises the threshold at which income tax is paid, but now it proposes minimum alcohol pricing, which punishes only those with very little money. Far worse is the housing problem. Here it is in a tremendous muddle (or do I mean Pickles?). In his party conference speech, David Cameron called boldly for far more housing, and Nicholas Boles, the new planning minister, made an excellent speech last month showing how planning restrictions ensure that new housing is ugly, mean and unaffordable for new entrants. Greenfield housing could be more beautiful, he said, than in-filling. Needless to say the Council for the Prevention of Rural Enterprise (CPRE) and the National Trust jumped in with their condemnations. Unnamed government sources then put it about that Mr Boles had gone too far. But he is right. Which of the National Trust’s glorious houses would get planning permission today under the regime favoured by the National Trust? How can the rural life so cherished by the CPRE possibly survive if you need at least £500,000 before you can buy a three-bedroomed house south of the Watford Gap? If fewer and fewer people can get decent housing, social improvement reverses, economic growth gets stuck, and ‘Disraeli’ Miliband’s warning about the Two Nations becomes real. Both Mr Cameron and George Osborne agree: they must say so much more often.
When the history of the Leveson report comes to be written (which I hope it won’t, because press regulation is the most tedious of all subjects), the evidence of Hugh Grant will be seen as the turning point. Grant accused the Daily Mail of hacking his phone. The explosive reaction of the Mail, with great headlines yelling about his mendacity, was the moment, I gather, when the iron entered the soul of Lord Leveson. He and his panel felt that, since every witness was on oath, none should be trashed. When the Mail decided to assassinate Grant’s character in print, it seemed to Leveson to confirm everything about the behaviour of the press which worried him. His recommendation of statute-backed regulation was the result. So Paul Dacre’s fight for press freedom may turn out like Arthur Scargill’s fight to save pits.
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