The Act of Settlement

I am in no doubt whatsoever that Gordon Brown has tried to engineer a debate on the rights of succession to the throne for his own narrow political interest - he wants to draw our attention away from the lamentable state his stewardship of the economy has left us in.

But this is a subject always worth giving a bit of thought to.

Firstly we must dispel the mystique to it all. Parliament has decreed that the heir to the throne should be male if possible, a descendant of George II and not a Roman Catholic. If Parliament has decreed this then Parliament can change its decree.

I have no objections to pure primogeniture - that is to say the eldest child inherits the throne regardless of sex. But allowing Roman Catholics to become monarch is a proposal of a different sort. The Monarch is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Thus such a change would involve the disestablishment of the Church.

There are plenty of good reasons for disestablishment, some of them in the interests of the Church itself. But we must not go off at half-cock on this, as Labour did over hereditary peers: destroying something that works, because you don't like the look of it, then finding it too difficult to decide what to replace it with.

This has to be thought through over a period of years and should have nothing to do with the next General Election, or Mr Brown's electoral plight, which is entirely of his own making.