I for one will be happy if I never see another picture of Prince Harry with that echidna as long as I live. Even so, a lot of Liberal Democrats will have been surprised, having just won the most remarkable by-election victory most of them can remember, to find themselves debating the monarchy as soon as they arrived in Brighton.
It is one of those subjects that give party bosses the vapours; hence the debate’s scheduling in the Sunday afternoon graveyard slot. But it is also a subject the public is happy to debate – some people appear to talk about little else.
So it is not quite right to say, as several speakers did, that our having the debate was a tribute to our courage as a party. It is nearer the truth to say that the fact that the other parties would never hold such a debate is a mark of their cowardice.
The motion we debated came from Liberal Democrat Youth and Students, who probably thought they were being daringly radical. But it was hard to resist the feeling that they had chosen a soft and outdated target.
One young woman said she did not want to live under an absolute monarchy. Someone should have told her that this has not been much of a threat since 1688 and the Glorious Revolution.
If LDYS want to be radical they should take on the people who really rule our lives – the managers, safety officers and petty officials. Harry and his echidna are the least of their worries.
* * * * * *
One of the great changes to the British electoral map in recent years has been the decline of the Conservatives in seaside resorts. Helped by those formidable landladies, they used to pile up colossal majorities all round the coast. Now many of them have fallen to us or to Labour, and we have plenty more in our sights.
Among the reasons why the seaside has fallen out of love with the Tories is the economic decline it suffered over the Thatcher and Major years. But things may at last be looking up. It is only a year since we were in Brighton, but the seafront has become noticeably smarter in that time.
A sad exception is the derelict West Pier. Last year it still retained some dignity, even if it did resemble Miss Haversham’s wedding cake. Today, after a serious fire, it looks like a turkey carcass several days after Christmas. You fear that it will take more than Gryff Rhys Jones to restore its glory.
Even so, I suspect the pier’s prospects are better than those of the Tory party.
I gave up competitive chess several years ago. I grew tired of draughty church halls and opponents who ought to have been climbing chimneys rather than playing with the grown ups.
There are former players in the Commons too. Angela and Maria Eagle were schoolgirl champions in the 1970s, and Evan Harris was quite a talent too. Come to that, so were Trotsky, Napoleon and Fidel Castro in their day, but I am sure that is only a coincidence.
On Monday Harris did his best for the game, asking the government to reclassify it as a sport so it can receive lottery funding. Richard Caborn, the sports minister, said that would require amendment of the fearsome-sounding Physical Training and Recreation Act of 1937.
Pressed by Tony McWalter, Labour MP for Hemel Hempstead and Harris’s bridge partner, Caborn said that any amendment would need support from ministers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. And there is little appetite for change at the moment.
Which teaches a valuable lesson. The more parliaments, assemblies and politicians there are, the harder it is to get anything done.
Other MPs asked about broadcasting, with Gerald Kaufman prominent among them. For some time I have been trying to work out who Kaufman reminds me of. Now I have it. It is the arch villain in Thunderbirds: the Hood.
They look alike, and each has a visceral hatred of a much-loved public institution. With the Hood, it is International Rescue: with Kaufman, it is the British Broadcasting Corporation.
“Is not the current state of the governance and accountability of the BBC utterly unacceptable when the head and deputy director of BBC News and the editor of the Today programme are allowed to get away with colluding in the back-door briefing of members of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and that editor is able to get away with approving a contentious article written by Andrew Gilligan for The Mail on Sunday? Apart from the resignations at all levels…”
At this point Kaufman’s eyes glowed red and he launched an experimental death ray (stolen from Brains’ laboratory) at Broadcasting House.
True, Kaufman comes from Manchester Gorton, while the Hood’s hideout is in a temple deep within the Malaysian jungle, but otherwise the similarities are uncanny.
As MPs’ mothers used to say, what are you doing in the House on a nice day like this? They should be out climbing trees, skinning their knees or feeling the wet sand between their toes. But thanks to Robin Cook’s reforms as Leader of the House, they are already back at Westminster.
When this short session before the party conferences was proposed, the big danger was the silly season. MPs would arrive back when the papers were still full of scare stories, and before we knew it would have voted to ban bowls or the keeping of goldfish.
As it turns out, they arrive back just as the Government is sending another 1200 troops to Iraq. The House’s business could not be more important, and it has revealed the utter redundancy of the Conservative Party.
I had better declare an interest here. Some comments I made in this column on education policy were subsequently repeated in the House by three different Tory MPs. They obviously hang on my every word.
Reader’s voice: The party of Disraeli, Salisbury and Baldwin must be in terrible trouble if it spends its time reading you.
House Points replies: Do you have to phrase it quite like that?
So listen up and listen good. The Tories’ ineffectual performance on Iraq is partly due to their shortage of front-bench talent. As one commentator said, Bernard Jenkin makes Geoff Hoon sound like Bismark.
But it goes deeper than that. The Conservative press in Britain has subcontracted comment on foreign affairs to North American voices. So much so that it appears almost unpatriotic.
The result is that the Tories have no new foreign policy thinking to draw on. All that is left to them is to attempt to support George Bush even more enthusiastically than Tony Blair. And he has practically ruptured himself as it is.
Out poodling the poodle never looked good politics. It is clear that the war in Iraq was disastrously misguided: it has brought about the very thing that its supporters feared – an alliance between Saddam Hussain’s supporters and Al Qaeda. But the Conservatives are in no position to say anything about it because they supported the Government every inch of the way.
Lecture over: you can go out and play now.