LOSS of POWER

The faintly ludicrous figure of Norman Lamont, these days known as Baron Lamont of Lerwick, does not swim into my consciousness very often. When he does, it is as likely as not in the context of Julian Clary’s notorious and outrageous joke at his expense. Otherwise, there was the debonair dismissal of political misfortune – “je ne regrette rien” – and the somewhat enigmatic story of his letting a flat to a Miss Whiplash. Oh, and there was Black Wednesday.

It’s another quote from John Mayor’s Chancellor that occurs to me now, the most quoted line from his resignation speech to the Commons after he had been offered a demotion that he found insulting. Lamont described Major as “giving the impression of being in office but not in power”. It was one of those “ouch” moments that the House relishes forever afterwards.

Lamont and Major back in the day

The coalition is having a lamentable – or, if you prefer, a lamontable – year that just seems to get worse. And some of the damage begins to look irreparable, particularly that self-inflicted by David Cameron himself. He is being increasingly seen – in his own party quite as much as outside it – as inept. At Prime Minister’s Questions, Ed Miliband has found how to get under his skin and – what Cameron maybe does not realise – it shows in the PM’s heightened colour, barely concealed anger and tendency to bluster. Moreover, Cameron’s notorious impatience with detail and procedure is dangerously prompting him to make policy on the hoof, as in his remarks about energy that were news to the department charged with that rather important subject.

The PM of the red face

The Andrew Mitchell debacle – inevitably dubbed Plebgate – has done far-reaching damage, not least in allowing Tory backbenchers a month largely free of being kept in line by the whips. Cameron ought to have been able to see at once that Mitchell’s authority – the only quality that a chief whip really needs – had been fatally undermined by the man’s inability to mount a coherent and convincing account of the exchange with the Downing Street police officer. When a party leader’s instincts – in this case to tough it out – leave him stuck in a corner, the followers inevitably begin to wonder if the game is up.

What with Boris Johnson capering merrily in the wings and the certainty that the coalition parties will be brushed aside in the imminent by-election in Tory marginal Corby, Cameron indeed starts to give the impression of being in office but not in power. I suspect that it is many weeks since Downing Street discounted the potential appeal of Ed Miliband under the scrutiny of a general election; even Fleet Street has reluctantly begun to acknowledge that Miliband has been playing it very long and very shrewd.

Ed Miliband projects

But my sense of it is that, although his backbenchers are palpably growing more critical if not openly mutinous, encouraged by such insider savagery as Lord Tebbitt directed at the government this weekend, Cameron’s main worry for the prospects both before and after the election concerns the Liberal Democrats.

Consider the bind in which Nick Clegg finds himself. What can he and his party offer at the 2015 general election? That they ameliorated the grosser effects of the Tories? Who will swallow that? That they achieved some of their cherished long-term aims? Which were those? That they surrendered their independence in the national interest and made common cause with the hated Tories to save the economy? Figures to be released this week may suggest that the longest double-dip recession Britain has ever experienced – which, moreover, only began on the coalition’s watch – is coming to an end, but who can believe that any but the richest voters will go to the polls next time with a good feeling about their own finances?

The reality is that, even if the statistics can be massaged to look promising, the broad mass of the electorate will still be hurting and will still not believe that “we are all in it together” in the risibly untrue phrase that the fare-diddling Chancellor had the gall to dredge up again in conference. What’s more, the Tories will be fighting the Lib Dems for every vote. Tory backbenchers will heap all perceived unpopularity onto the coalition’s “weak sister”.

Andrew Mitchell leaves office

Of the Lib Dems’ 57 seats, 28 (virtually half) are held with majorities below 5,000 votes, all of which must be feeling vulnerable. Don’t expect Sarah Teather, John Hemming, Jo Swinson, Chris Huhne or even that old warhorse Sir Alan Beith to return at the next election.

Nine Lib Dems have majorities above 10,000, which might be thought to be relatively safe. Interestingly, all the past leaders still in the Commons number among those nine – Paddy Ashdown, Charles Kennedy, Sir Menzies Campbell – along with the present leader, Nick Clegg, and the mooted future leader, Vince Cable. But you wouldn’t want to put folding money on Clegg retaining his Sheffield Hallam seat, especially as students have long been moving into the area in order to punish him over tuition fees.

But the support for the Lib Dems as measured by opinion polls is so low and so half-hearted that they will be lucky even to retain eight of the nine purportedly “safest”. I habitually discount the “evidence” of those pseudo-scientists the pollsters, but I confidently predict (based simply on what my waters tell me) that the Lib Dem candidate in Corby will be beaten by both the Green and the UKIP candidates and consequently will lose her deposit. She may even be overtaken by the anti-wind-farms independent (the journalist and prize ass James Delingpole) and by the Monster Raving Loony Party representative, a Mr Toby Jug.

Nick Clegg: things can only get ... um ...

Contemplating annihilation, the Lib Dems surely must be considering their options. A number of statements lately by Clegg and others – statements, mind; not actions – tend to suggest that the Lib Dems are beginning to see the need to let light become visible between them and their coalition partners. But surely something more dramatic and far-reaching is required.

If I were Clegg, I would be looking as a matter of urgency for the issue on which I could credibly and creditably lead my party out of power. To do so would certainly bring down the government. Cameron would have no choice but to try and soldier on with a minority administration. Labour, promptly unveiling its hitherto mysterious plan for government, would take the first opportunity to seek a vote of confidence, which the Tories would lose. Then Clegg could fight a general election not as the ineffectual junior partner of a reviled and blundering coalition but as the leader who had the “courage” to bring down the coalition on “a point of principle”. Believe me, it’s the only scenario that will save his party from electoral annihilation.

Elsewhere in the wild wood that is coalition government, some of the forest creatures lollop along as if without a care in the world. Here’s a story that reveals more about the Tory hegemony than might appear on the surface. That egregious twit Jeremy Hunt was recently present at a Buckingham Palace reception, clearly still basking in the Olympic glow that he erroneously believes may redeem his disgraceful stint as Secretary of State for Media, Culture & Sport. When he and the monarch duly came to face to face, little Hunt was ready with his anecdote, delivered, we may be certain, with all the toe-curling brightness of a shiny-faced Vth-former.

Jeremy Hunt: please like me

He related how a Japanese diplomat had assured him that the Emperor would never have been so game and public-spirited as to (pretend to) leap from a helicopter for the entertainment of the viewers of the Olympiad ceremony. The Queen, who obviously would have immediately tuned him out on the words “Japanese diplomat”, shrugged and moved on (the authenticity of this story is underlined by how absolutely convincing the account of the monarch’s demeanour contrives to be).

Hunt had barely begun to choke back his gush when the Duke loomed over him and barked “who are you?” How we all wish we had been eye-witnesses to this double whammy of vertiginous rebuffs. But really: if the public school millionaires in the cabinet don’t know how to make small talk with royalty, what earthly use are they?

LONGING to REIGN OVER US

As is my wont, I found plenty to occupy me over the grossly extended half-week holiday and never felt sufficiently at a loose end to find myself tuning in to any of the blowsy and noisy shenanigans somebody thought might be welcome to Her Majesty the Queen to mark the sixtieth anniversary of her accession.

Of course, these things cannot be wholly avoided. The news on BBC1 on Monday night, delayed longer than even I had anticipated, was equally predictably dominated by a digest of what had clearly been comprehensively covered on the same channel for the preceding three-and-a-half hours. Seeking enlightenment about the state of the world is futile on days like these.

The snippets on the bulletin gave more than enough sense of what I had missed, especially its unendurable length. Such ritualistic events can only be borne if one is an actual participant, and even then there are always hours of standing around feeling useless unless one is, as it were, the bride, the bar mitzvah, the Nobel laureate, the convicted murderer, the new pope, the corpse to be buried or (as in this case) the monarch. Beyond the guest list, everyone – whether halfway down the Mall or watching on telly – is in the position of Stella Dallas: nose pressed up against the window of a party to which she is not invited. I have never understood the appeal of rubbernecking the pleasures of others. I don’t scurry to see the aftermath of a car-crash either.


A fraction of the Jubilee river pageant

It further beats me why anyone imagines Elizabeth Windsor would want a pop concert in her honour, especially one in the street right outside her front windows. She has never revealed the remotest interest in or liking for music, or indeed culture of any kind, popular or haute. She skipped the Royal Variety Performance the past two years – even though patron of the Entertainment Artistes’ Benevolent Fund, the show’s beneficiary – and she alternates with her eldest son at the Royal Film Performance these days.

But nothing about the bean-feast makes great sense. Its universally used description – Diamond Jubilee – is a misnomer twice over. The earliest appearance of the term ‘jubilee’ in English is in the Wycliffe Bible: “And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you” [Leviticus 25:10]. The word derives from the Hebrew yobel, which is a ram, indicating that the ceremonial blowing of a ram’s horn marked the celebration of jubilee. Gradually -– as was generally the way with the spoken language and with corruption in translation – the meaning migrated from its primary sense of being a half-century event.

Meanwhile, among the precious metals and gemstones signifying the passage of time – sapphire for five years, ruby 15 and 40 years, silver 25, pearl 30, gold 50 – a diamond traditionally signified ten or 75 years. It was only because Joseph Chamberlain, Colonial Secretary in Salisbury’s Unionist government, proposed that Queen Victoria’s waning esteem among her subjects be bolstered by a public celebration of the longevity of her reign (now the longest in British history) along with a salute to the extent of the British Empire (at its high-water mark) that what would have been the Diamond Jubilee due in 1912 (had she lived) was brought forward fifteen years.


Queen Victoria: the official Diamond Jubilee photograph

Chamberlain’s perception was triumphantly vindicated and his monarch died twelve years shy of what would properly have been her Diamond Jubilee, yet withal full of years and greatly beloved of her hitherto indifferent subjects, both in the British Isles and in the vast Empire. Since then, the diamond has additionally (if incorrectly and lazily) been attached to 60 years, to the extent that I have been unable to discover which gemstone or metal hitherto had represented six decades.

The enthusiasm for the throne is ever in flux, at least in these islands. Elsewhere, a certain amount of nose-holding may often be detected – the sourpuss expression of Julia Gillard as she lit the Canberra beacon on behalf of Australia was unmistakeable – but, if opinion polls may be believed (and I habitually doubt that they can be), the Queen is held in wide regard just now, the anni horribiles being long set aside.

The republican cause – intellectually perfectly understandable – has always faced difficulty gaining much traction, for the simple reason that the throne is, for all practical purposes, merely ceremonial and therefore only a source of urgent debate in the rarest of circumstances. As the nature of British society has changed – and changed extensively – over Elizabeth II’s reign, so the argument that her family sits at the apex of a repressive pyramid weakens. Formally, Britain is a constitutional monarchy managed as a representative democracy. Informally, one might characterise it as a class-based oligarchy in 1952 that has metamorphosed into a plutocracy (of international capital) managed as a celebritocracy now. The monarchy is marginal to this movement of history.


Victoria's landau arrives at Mansion House

There is pitifully little to be said for removing the throne and replacing it with a presidency, because the monarchy is no longer surrounded by an hereditary aristocracy with power or influence or indeed wealth. The House of Lords is gradually being democratised and in any case has no more than delaying power over an elected Commons. If the throne were abolished, the Queen or the Prince of Wales would be the favourite candidate to be elected head of state. The former royal family would remain relatively wealthy, well-connected and of continual interest to the media. The republican movement must know that theirs is a forlorn hope.

And the odd carping about the BBC’s coverage and its supposed sycophancy seems misplaced. As I say, I only have news bulletins to go on, but I have heard three interviews with avowed republicans during the course of the four-day celebration and that seems very reasonable. Besides, the BBC was established by royal charter and is the national broadcaster of a kingdom: it would be a curious stance, not to say lèse-majesté, for it to project hostility or even indifference to the institution of monarchy. Its correspondents have diligently remarked the fact of republicanism. That seems to me to be sufficient.

Meanwhile, those pesky public opinion polls have muddied the water again by finding a majority in favour of Elizabeth II being succeeded directly by William V. This is a bizarre opinion and it is a pity that the pollsters did not have the gumption to ask supplementary questions in order to elucidate the source of this fancy. Is it imagined that William would make “a better monarch” than his father and if so in what way?


The route of Victoria's Jubilee procession

All we seek in a ceremonial head of state is someone who can read the government’s clunking prose at the State Opening of Parliament without a palpable tone of disdain, get through a garden party without asking someone in a motorised wheelchair if they’ve “come far”, and play host at a state banquet with the head of some god-forsaken dictatorship somewhere a long way away without keeling over into the crème brûlée or goosing any of the said head’s wives. These are all cogent reasons why neither Russell Brand nor Boris Johnson would be first choice as head of state in a republican UK.

Prince Charles is of course in some ways a dismaying testament to in-breeding and private education, but he has gamely survived as Prince of Wales – than which there is no more resonant “number two” designation in the history of the world – for more than half a century, having been handed his title a decade before his formal investiture at Caernarfon Castle in 1969. Princes of Wales have, from time immemorial, behaved as licensed fools, and Charles has been afforded an inordinate amount of time in which to do this, having waited longer than any previous heir apparent, when he overtook the impatient apprenticeship of his great-great-grandfather, who eventually became Edward VII. All things considered, he has not let his mummy down all that much.

Elizabeth II is not going to abdicate, you can bet your boots, just to give her eldest son a better run at it. If she lives to 105, which seems perfectly feasible, she will have been the longest-reigning queen in the history of the world by more than fifteen years and her son (if he outlives her) will be 82 or 83, a good age for a new career. It seems unlikely that Her Majesty will exceed the longest accredited male reign, however. That daunting record belongs to King Sobhuza II of Swaziland who retired to join his ancestors in 1982, having reigned since the last December of the previous century.


Ahead of being presented, Sir Elton frets that he may be underdressed

Prince Charles has been a public figure for sixty years and, for good or ill, he has a fairly well-defined public profile. No doubt like anyone else in the public eye, his actual persona is very different in many crucial ways from the public perception. I do not know him personally, so I cannot say. (I stood in for his mother once, but that’s a matter for another day).

Charles has many firm views, not all of them completely batty, and he has had the temerity to express them. I should have thought that on balance his public expression of notions has probably done a bit more good than harm. I am also quite sure that he knows enough to know that, if and when he does ever become king, he will need to keep his views to himself thenceforward.

Prince William, on the contrary, is pretty much a closed book to most of us, I would suggest. Can you think of five adjectives to describe what you perceive to be his character? Neither can I. He seems to be merely a polite, quite presentable young man who is losing his looks even faster than most of the Windsors are apt to do.

But see here: those who advocate the succession skipping the present Prince of Wales profess themselves supporters of an hereditary monarchy, even while they make this exception. As Marie-Antoinette might have remarked: “let them eat their cake and have it too”. There is no coherent, consistent or respectable argument for Prince Charles standing aside. That the Queen asked the Duchess of Cornwall to sit beside her in the laudau (Charles facing the rear) on the return ride from St Paul’s on Tuesday is as explicit and minatory a gesture as she can ever have offered about anything. “This woman is the wife of my successor, and she and he are my anointed” the gesture announced. “Get used to it”.


Royal fireworks

Later, on the balcony, it was impossible to resist the implication that the chosen group was the inner core for the rest of her reign: the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Cambridges and Prince Harry who will certainly, on the death of his uncle Andrew, become Duke of York. The present Duke – along with the Princess Royal and the Earl of Wessex – are suddenly as supernumerary as the Gloucesters and the Kents.

Meanwhile, the Duke of Edinburgh – whose title Wessex is to inherit – had absented himself from the events of Monday and Tuesday, perhaps not entirely involuntarily: five minutes of ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ would certainly have been five too many for him. It was Prince Edward and his brood who were the Duke’s family visitors in hospital on Tuesday. I can just hear him barking: “Bloody hell, are you the only one they could spare?”

There was a deal of speculation about how much the Queen was missing her husband’s presence in the latter half of the celebrations. I imagine she coped. After all, she had half a century to observe the example of her own mother, who spent almost exactly half her life as a widow. The key to all things to do with the throne is the long game. Durability, in the end, is one of the virtues people most admire.

TAKE THIS WOMAN

Thirty years ago, I was reviewing television for the weekly trade magazine Broadcast. My benign editor, Pattie Williams, gave me carte blanche to cover whatever I wanted and to arrange the material how it suited me. I soon fell into a pattern of pulling together all the recent dramas in one column, the last few weeks’ documentaries in another, then various current affairs programmes and so on.

The one area I rarely wrote about was outside broadcasts. It is in the nature of OBs that the subject matter is rarely initiated by the television companies. Almost always, OB cameras are present at an event that would be taking place whether the cameras were there or not, most commonly sporting fixtures. Sport anyway makes my teeth hurt – though we’ll sit through quite a bit of BBC2’s coverage of the Masters from Augusta tomorrow and Sunday nights. But in all but the rarest case, OBs are not very interesting televisually, that is to say qua television.

What was supposed to be the beginning of a "fairy tale"

I always tried to write about television in a way that focussed on the medium itself. Hence, when covering those programmes that originated in television – drama, dockos, sitcom and so on – I attended greatly to the distinctions between various directors and producers. I wrote quite as much of how one sees as about what one sees. In sum, what I was really writing about was the medium and its programme-making rather than (as so many critics, supremely Clive James, did) the world seen through the television window. I felt that I was treating my subject rather as a good book critic writes about literature and the writing of books rather than the details of plot in a novel or the niceties of argument deployed in non-fiction.

As the wedding of HRH the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer loomed, Pattie asked me gently if I planned to write about the coverage. I didn’t need to ponder before I said no and she accepted that with good grace. (I may misremember but I have a feeling that she commissioned someone else to write a one-off piece, to accompany rather than to supplant my own column).

Lady Diana rides into unreality television

A large public event like a royal wedding or a state funeral allows little scope for creative thought on the part of broadcasters unless the Palace itself decides to tinker with the format. So, for the editor in charge of coverage, the line producer and the director(s), it is far more of a logistical than an artistic exercise. Hungry newspapers try to build stories out of which celebs have been dragged in to give their precious views (anyone remotely famous who sounds English but hasn’t already been signed up by an American network for this month’s royal wedding has clearly missed a trick). But in truth there is very little mileage in the story of what television companies plan for their respective broadcasts, save for stuff about the cost.

Quite apart from the event’s lack of interest in purely televisual terms, I found no personal interest in it. My line at the time of the 1981 hullabaloo was: “I’m a Socialist, a republican, a humanist and a homosexual. What is there for me in a royal wedding?”

Royal couple-to-be: pretext for a marketing frenzy

There have been a few of these things in my time. Six months to the day after my birth, HRH Princess Elizabeth married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten RN. Few of the groom’s relatives attended. All of his sisters were married to Germans so they were not invited so soon after the war. Most of the nation followed the event on the wireless. Those few who owned television sets will have seen a sprinkling of live shots from outside Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey. Later in the evening, a compilation of swiftly developed and edited film of the procession was broadcast.

It was not until the coronation of Princess Elizabeth as Queen in 1952 that the BBC had the resources to mount full coverage of the day’s events, including shots inside the Abbey. It was this transmission that established the medium as something everyone wanted to follow. A million sets were sold in the UK that year.

Royal wedding 1947 style

As well as the Prince of Wales, four of Her Majesty’s other relatives have elected to marry on television – and all but one of them (the now widowed Princess Alexandra) to divorce (not on television). The Queen’s youngest child, the Earl of Wessex, had a quiet ceremony at St George’s Chapel, Windsor and also remains wed.

I sat through the televised marriage of Princess Margaret to the trendy photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones in 1960. We had the day off school and my mother, a great royalist, decreed that watching was mandatory. The thing about it that has stayed with me most vividly is a remark by that swishy old queen Norman Hartnell about his design for the bride’s gown: “All the work is under the dress”. That seemed to me then and still seems a perfect evocation of the art that conceals art.

Serial wedder Henry VIII

Otherwise, I have avoided these atavistic marathons of non-television in which the merest platitude is uttered and then repeated as if a pearl of boundless price. In The Guardian the other day, various writers who think themselves wits were listing the supposedly subversive events that they plan to attend on the day that HRH Prince William plights his troth with Miss Catherine Middleton. How absurd. It’s like refusing to step into a church to look at the impressive Norman architecture because you’re an atheist. If you’re going to attend an anti-street party, you may as well go to a real one. To the question “what are you doing on April 29th?", my answer would be: “I’ve no idea, it’s three weeks away”.

At the Charles’n’Di do, the most interesting nugget was the lack of an invitation issued to the bride’s step-grandmother, that great, quivering pink blancmange of a romantic novelist, Barbara Cartland. No doubt someone advised of the likelihood that she would upstage most of the royal family, if not the Queen Mum herself. That of course would have made it worth a few moments of dipping into.

At the end of my Broadcast review of other (now forgotten) programming, I explained in a brief paragraph why I would not be covering the royal wedding. I ended by observing that “the wedding without Barbara Cartland will be like Hamlet without the Player Queen”. I thought this was a rather adroit witticism that would be repeated widely but it never was. I put that down to the narrow circulation of the magazine. Probably now it will go viral (whatever that means).

Player Queen

HARRODS COLLUDING HAUL

I have a confession to make – or, as they say nowadays, I want to ’fess up. I was part of the conspiracy to kill the Princess of Wales. Yes, me. Little me. Shocked you, didn’t I. Of course, I wasn’t in it on my own. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a conspiracy. Jade Goody was in it too. And Britney Spears. And Michael Winner. And oh, Derek Conway, you know, the MP who put his ne’er-do-well sons on the parliamentary payroll. And Sir Elton John. And Wayne Sleep. And John Travolta. And Gianni Versace. And Diana Dors, Diana Ross, Dame Diana Rigg, Lady Diana Mosley, Lady Diana Cooper, Diana Vreeland, Diana Krall, Diana Wynyard, all of whom deeply resented the way the Princess annexed a name they had hitherto considered to indicate themselves. Resented enough to kill. Oh, and Guy Fawkes. And the Count of Monte Cristo. And Alice in Wonderland.

Of course, we all resent even more the failure of that wise and astute observer of the scene, Mohamed Al Fayed, to drop our names in court. After all, he dropped so many. I think he should have played it like Bette Midler did in her stage show at a time when many revelations were emerging about the late American president. She pointed melodramatically to herself: “Hey, guess what, I have a secret to impart. I slept with Jack Kennedy”. And then, raking the audience with both hands, she shrieked: “And you know what? They slept with Jack Kennedy”.

What I admired so much about Mr Al Fayed’s testimony was the forensic detail into which he went in his evidence of this truly astounding conspiracy. A lesser man would have taken advantage of the freedom that a law court permits to make accusations without fear of slander. Mr Al Fayed could so easily have taken that low road. Instead he went into astonishing detail.

For instance, his revelation that the Duke of Edinburgh is a German Nazi whose actual name is Frankenstein clearly changes our very conception of the Royal Family. We had always understood His Royal Highness to be of Greek nationality. Perhaps after all it is the Queen who is the Greek. Her consort probably hails from the Schwarzwald area of south-west Germany that borders Switzerland (Dr Victor Frankenstein was, after all, Swiss by birth; also of course – which may be news to Mr Al Fayed – he was fictional). I hope the Harrods boss will endeavour to confirm these origins, perhaps by means of his charming spokesman, the famously coiffed Michael Cole.

Where Mr Al Fayed rashly overplayed his hand was in speaking out on the street outside the high court. He told a journalist he was “an idiot” which is surely not likely to provoke legal action (the greater difficulty would be to ascertain that a journalist was not an idiot). But he further accused him of being “part of the conspiracy” before he was hustled away by his minders. It would be the worst of luck for the Harrods boss if he happened to fling this accusation at the one man in Britain who was not in fact in on the conspiracy, In that case, I hope the journalist is public-spirited enough to sue Mr Al Fayed for slander. Then the great conspiracy can finally be tested properly in court and Mr Al Fayed can at last have the opportunity of laying out his compelling evidence for the public to marvel at, an opportunity so grievously denied him by the terms of the inquest.

Should the case go against him, Mr Al Fayed may of course refuse to pay the substantial compensation to the reporter that the court would certainly levy. And then he would be liable to go to jail. Mr Al Fayed might then take the route of Mr Pickwick and elect to be incarcerated as a matter of principle. This might prove to be a mistake. Notoriously, Mr Al Fayed is not a British citizen. Indeed, there is a widely but doubtless scurrilously held view that Mr Al Fayed’s conspiracy theories all stem from the persistent refusal of the British authorities to award him citizenship. I wonder if Mr Al Fayed is sufficiently familiar with the regimes commonly pursued in the jails of Egypt to wish to serve his sentence in one of them.

Perhaps the most incredible aspect of this whole fantastical episode is Mr Al Fayed’s announcement that he will accept the findings of the inquest. We would do well to remember that this is one Mohamed who is not a prophet.

A WISE FATHER KNOWS HIS OWN CHILD

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is passing through the House of Lords. Among its provisions is one that grants the full legality of parenthood to both partners of a relationship that generates a child by IVF treatment. Needless to say, that fiercest of lobbies, the sanctity-of-marriage brigade, is back up on its high horse. A lesbian couple, they shriek, will be able to co-parent without benefit of a father figure.

The reigning father figure of the Catholic church in Britain, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, leads the charge. His letter to The Times on Monday raised a number of disputed areas upon which the bill touches, but none is more clearly in his sights than the family that does not conform to scriptural teaching or rather (to be scrupulous about it, given the lousy deal that women receive throughout The Bible) to contemporary theology. The Cardinal is most famous, of course, for his history of giving succour to pederast priests who operated in his see when he was a mere bishop. Despite being an unmarried virgin, he reckons to know more about the morality of parenthood than anyone else in Britain. We should listen to him carefully, though only because he wields power and influence out of all proportion to his experience of parenthood and family life.

On Monday’s World at One on Radio 4, M-O’C declared that “children need a known father and this bill seems to me to be saying that children don’t need a known father and I oppose – I think the majority of people in this country oppose – the deliberate creation of a situation where there’s no father”. Later, he said: “It’s not just about rights, about legislation even, it’s about the fundamental understanding of our country about marriage”.

A number of elements are at work here. The religious lobby – particularly in the United States – has been squaring up for a long time to grow a movement that aims to overthrow the legislature by irresistible force or to seize power by electoral means and control the legislature or (the least preferable option for them but the most likely to occur) to begin a campaign of civil disobedience. You see a nod to that development in the Cardinal’s sly downgrading of rights and legislation.

Meanwhile, the fear among the religious that the church’s control of the notion of family has been seriously weakened since World War II has persuaded even moderate church-goers to start to sound more fundamentalist on the differing family models that now obtain, even in religiously influenced nations like the States. Marriage and family have become interchangeable concepts for these people since co-habiting (as opposed to “living in sin”) became widely accepted and civil partnerships between same-sex couples were enshrined in law. M-O’C and his kind desperately wish to turn the clock back. Preferably a couple of thousand years.

I want to ask the Cardinal: “which is more desirable: for a child to have a quelled mother who works in vain to bring in money and a wastrel father who fritters the money away on drink and/or drugs and abuses (mentally, physically or both, take your pick) both the mother and the child; or for a child to have two loving, well-adjusted mothers?” It’s what is now called “a no-brainer”, isn’t it?

It is odd that Catholics prelates, who themselves foreswear conventional family life, fight so hard to uphold the conventional family model. Today, Elizabeth Windsor and her Greek husband mark 60 years of supposed wedded bliss. There is no need for me to air any of the rumours, some of them going back almost 60 years, of the Duke’s many and sustained infidelities. Conceivably they are all groundless. Your guess is at least as good as mine.

But the royal couple, whose durable arrangement was celebrated in the Abbey on Monday, head a family considerably more dysfunctional than the families of many of her subjects (and probably most of her church-going subjects). The Queen’s late sister and three of her four children went through the divorce courts. To the generation of Her Majesty’s mother, such a thing would have been unthinkable. After all, her own brother-in-law was obliged to abdicate because he insisted on marrying a divorcee.

To Catholics of the generation of Murphy-O’Connor’s parents, divorce was simply not permitted. Yet you don’t hear this leader of British Catholics condemning the royal divorcees. Perhaps the simple truth is that unnamed lesbian couples make a safer target.