Affairs of State
There is no-one in Britain as gifted as Simon Heffer for cutting through the crap and getting to what really matters. Heffer appears to believe that Mrs Thatcher's achievements -- and they were many, if on the whole the opposite of what her acolytes would believe them to be -- can only achieve the recognition they deserve if her place in the peerage is higher than Charles Falconer's. Mrs Thatcher! The shopkeeper's daughter from Grantham. How could someone who claims to be a friend of hers so misunderstand her political philosophy?!A friend of the royal family’s lamented the other day that the Princess Royal, for reasons about which he could only speculate, has declined her mother’s offer of a dukedom and, therefore, a place in the nobility for her son and his heirs. This does seem an extreme act of self-effacement by one who, unlike some of her tribe, works extremely hard and doesn’t insist on using the company helicopter just to nip out to Tesco. Also, thanks to Mr Blair’s brilliant reform of the House of Lords, even if her son became the 2nd Duke he would not inherit the right to sit in the legislature. It was allegedly fears about Sir Mark Thatcher ending up in the Lords that dissuaded his mother from taking the earldom that was her due when she left the Commons in 1992. Thanks again to Mr Blair’s brilliant reform, there would now be no danger of that either. I am fed up with the standing insult to our greatest living statesman that she should occupy the same rank in the peerage as people whose qualification for the Lords is that they once shared a flat with Mr Blair. With her 80th birthday coming next October, I trust an appropriate gesture can now be made to rectify this unacceptable state of affairs.
posted by Matthew @ 3/19/2005 11:20:00 PM
Comments: 0
