Only Gerald Warner could write this:
The now extra-Parliamentary hereditary peerage should be returned to the exclusive jurisdiction of Her Majesty the Queen, as the Orders of the Garter and the Thistle have been. In future, instead of awarding a Most Noble Marquess who has done sterling service in the community a Knighthood of the Garter, the Queen should consider offering him promotion to a dukedom. None of this should have anything to do with the Prime Minister of the day: let him hand out life peerages to any scallywags he wishes; but the hereditary peerage should continue as a body of true nobility under the Queen. Dukes and other hereditary peers are living heritage: we should be more concerned to conserve them than nasty creatures such as the Natterjack toad.
Gerald Warner is the English-speaking world's most - perhaps only - puritanical High Church Tory.
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of politicians, pundits and partisans who still call themselves "Tories", but there is only one public persona on this planet who truly lives up to the real meaning of that word, so much so that he is no doubt villified by his own party as some sort of psychotic Uber Tory of the old school.