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Royals and Remembrance

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Once Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night have passed, poppy season is all that remains to block Christmas from achieving total domination for the rest of the year. There are, of course, two separate dates for this occasion — Armistice Day (always 11th November, the exact anniversary of the end of the First World War) and Remembrance Sunday (second Sunday in November, a broader commemoration of war dead). Both of these events involve two-minute national silences… assuming, of course, that a silence actually falls. Due to the logistics and practicalities of the working week, some organisations have to hold subsidiary events outside the universal dates. Silences here can be hard to regulate if everyone around isn’t coordinated with it. I remember quite a few occasions from childhood when a reverent, contemplative peace was anything but. Even the highest are not immune to this: The Queen attended a service at Westminster Abbey last Thursday, but it was immediately outside rather than inside the main building. As you would expect from an open-air event in central London on a weekday, the “silence” was actually filled with a lot of traffic noise as well as two different emergency sirens. The only blessing was that at least there were no dogs barking. I’m actually a little surprised that this phenomenon hasn’t been the subject of a Family Guy cutaway by now, given that it would be an easy way to get two minutes of padding with minimal animation.

Another big event in November is the United Nations Climate Change Conference, now taking place in Belém, Brazil. The Prince of Wales flew down some days in advance to present his Earthshot Prize, which Sir Keir Starmer also attended, though neither stayed for COP30 itself. This is the latest in a long line of solo overseas engagements undertaken by the heir apparent since his wife’s cancer diagnosis last year*. William was back in time for the Sunday cenotaph service but he missed the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday night. Prince George attended for the first time, in his father’s place. The festival includes the religious and patriotic music expected for a solemn occasion, but also a handful of modern entries. One of these was a cover of Avicii’s The Nights. I can’t work out whether it adds to or detracts from the spirit of the event to know that Avicii himself, err, left this world behind some years ago, his life clearly remembered but tragically brief, and predeceased his father. He was from Sweden, a country formally neutral in both world wars. The festival featured multiple performances from Sir Rod Stewart, who sported the unusual sartorial combination of a knight bachelor’s badge hung from an open shirt.

The cenotaph ceremony in Whitehall traditionally involves the laying of wreaths by senior royals, senior servicemen, cabinet ministers, diplomats, various officials representing the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, and leaders of the significant political parties in the House of Commons. This has always been a bugbear for Nigel Farage, because his parties have so far never met the threshold of six MPs needed to qualify. UKIP in 2015 got 12.6% of the popular vote but only one seat. Douglas Carswell, as the party’s sole representative in the Commons, was regarded for procedural purposes as an independent rather than a leader. Reform in 2024 got 14.3% of the vote and five seats. The cruel twist here is that since the election the Reform caucus has gained two members (one from defection, one from by-election) but also lost two of the originals, so that when November came they were back as they started. It should be noted that the six-member rule, introduced in 1984, has exceptions for the Northern Ireland parties to avoid the appearance of sectarian bias. It is also possible for two or more parties to coalesce for this purpose, as Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party have done since 2001**.

The Princess Royal was also absent from the London commemorations, having gone on a royal tour of Australia. She instead paid her respects at the ANZAC memorial in Sydney. It is a little extraordinary for two royal overseas visits to take place at the same time, especially when both of those away from the United Kingdom are counsellors of state. Recently I have been constructing a Wikipedia page listing all of Anne’s official overseas travel (similar to those which already exist for other senior royals) but it has quickly become a little overwhelming to see just how busy she is, with twenty such journeys listed in the Court Circular just for the last two years.

One ought probably to discuss heraldic matters now. In some of the photographs of Anne’s visit I can see her two crosses and a heart flying in various places. I didn’t see William or Camilla flying theirs in the outings aforementioned. Close-up shots of the wreaths laid and crosses planted also show royal symbols. The Queen’s monogram appeared on hers, complete with the Tudor crown. William’s, even now, still uses the pre-Carolean design (note the oak leaves and lack of arch on the coronet). The King’s wreath did not use his monogram, but instead the full royal achievement with BUCKINGHAM PALACE underneath. Once again it was the old-style illustration with St Edward’s crown.

Sir Lindsay Hoyle is something of a vexillophile and has taken to Tweeting whenever a new flag is flown from New Palace Yard. In 2021 he began making a point of raising the flags of the Overseas Territories. His most recent example was the flag of the British Indian Ocean Territory, allegedly celebrating its national day. I can’t find photographic evidence (including on Parliament.UK) of the flag actually flying in the yard, so I can only go on the image shown in the Tweet itself. The BIOT flag includes the Imperial crown, sometimes with a cap of maintenance and sometimes without, but always in the St Edward form. Hoyle’s picture had a Tudor crown. I cannot find this version on the territory’s website or any other source. Is it a custom make? The BIOT is currently the subject of a slow-moving but high-stakes political controversy as Starmer’s government intends to cede sovereignty of the landmasses to Mauritius. This would mean that the territory as a political entity ceases to exist, hence no point updating the flag. I notice that there was not a representative of the BIOT among all the other BOT representatives laying wreaths at the cenotaph. The flag of the BIOT has been widely used in the campaign against the handover, including by the displaced islanders themselves. The bill to ratify the handover passed the House of Commons and recently had its second reading in the Lords, but then there were reports that the government has paused its progress due to public resistance. In this context it is tempting to read Mr Speaker’s Tweet as a not-so-subtle dig at the Prime Minister.

Finally, a point about Flickr: The cenotaph ceremony and the Earthshot prize both produced plenty of government photographs which can be moved onto Wikimedia Commons. The former had two photographers: Simon Dawson for the Prime Minister’s Office and Gunter Hofer for the DCMS. After migrating both albums across I quickly realised that the time stamps given in the metadata were wrong. Dawson’s were one hour too late (probably not adjusted for daylight savings) while the DCMS ones were in some cases out by a whole year! This feels like an elementary mistake for a professional photographer. Sadly there are not likely to be many photographs of Anne’s excursion to Sydney for the reasons I explained last year.

FOOTNOTES

*The Princess of Wales appears not to have gone abroad on official business since 15 October 2023.
**The SNP alone has won at least six seats in every subsequent general election, so in practice the utility of this alliance is one-sided.

Review: The Country Railway by David St John Thomas

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After a tumultuous voyage through Dead Europe I needed a rest on more familiar literary ground. The most obvious choice was another railway book. This one was printed in 1979 with an original price of £1.50. I picked it up from Dovehouse Hospice earlier this year for £1.00. The book is a few years older than The Penguin Guide to the Railways of Britain and rather different in scope: It is only really looking at the past rather than the present and it focuses, as the name implies, specifically on the rural lines rather than the urban ones. This book also doesn’t trouble itself to recap the evolution of locomotives and rolling stock from the beginning, assuming the reader already knows the broad strokes and only bringing up the details where directly necessary. Instead this book is mainly about the experience of daily life for the workers and passengers, as well as the financial aspects of operating the organisation.

The phrase “Country Railway” feels inherently nostalgic precisely because, following the Beeching Axe, there are not many of them around anymore (save heritage lines). A recurring theme of books like this is that the railways were vital to the survival of rural communities yet paradoxically those rural communities tended to be a dead loss to the railways. Closures of country lines would be bitterly mourned despite few people actually riding on them. There is an element of the rotten boroughs about some of the remote services where trains were run back and forth daily with full signalling operations and well-built stations even though the carriages would were at low capacity at the best of times and frequently had no passengers at all. The opening paragraphs of Chapter 8 (starting page 120) lay this out in most striking terms, and it is difficult to avoid simply quoting the entire page verbatim: Rural railways companies insisted on building and staffing their lines, stations and signal boxes to the same standards of quality — as well as safety — that would be expected on urban routes despite the far lower ticket revenue, in contrast to Continental Europe where country railways were far more cheaply constructed. As Thomas sums up:

“An army could have been carried in safety where only scores of people ever travelled. Because stations were so costly, they were often not provided at all where there might still have been useful traffic; and one could argue that in the motor age more lives would have been saved had the railways reduced safety standards — more people would have gone by train, which would still have been safer than buses and cars.”

It may feel a little odd to read someone explicitly argue for the moral virtue of cutting corners in public safety, but a robust case is made that the builders’ noble aspirations actually doomed their projects in the long run. Thomas notes another major obstacle in the need for the company to get a special Act of Parliament passed and/or secure the consent of all the landowners along the route, which an attempted streamlining of the process in 1864 failed to fix. The result was that construction costs per mile of track ended up being many times the original estimates and the railway companies frequently found themselves financially sunk before operations even started. These problems are entirely familiar in the present day. Indeed, I was struck when reading this section by how much the prose of a book on such a genteel topic, written nearly fifty years ago and describing events almost a hundred years before that, bore so much resemblance to that by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson in Abundance, released earlier this year and addressing the same problems on a larger scale in the present — even including the building of railway lines!

On the flipside, the book also emphasises the death and destruction that results when strict safety protocols are not followed, the appendix retelling the tale of the Abermule Disaster of 1921, in which a quartet of negligent station staff got a pair of signalling tablets swapped around so that two trains collided head-on. The final sentence draws parallels with RMS Titanic:

“Time and again one or other of these mistakes had been made with impunity, but at Abermule on that disastrous day, like the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, these trifling faults fitted one into another until the sombre picture was complete.”

The book looks over the lifestyle of the rural stationmaster, isolated from the station’s local community, assailed from above as well as below and occupying a liminal, uncertain position within the British class system of the time. The ticket prices were no less convoluted then than now with a dizzying array of tariffs, rates, discounts, equivalences and exceptions. Thomas further looks at the advancement of new technologies and working practices in railway operations, particularly as regards the directions of trains — from turntables to passing loops to runarounds to push-pull to double-ended railcars. A recurrent problem for this sector was that, although the stationery infrastructure was kept to the same standard as the urban lines, the moving parts were not. Whereas the intercity main lines were upgraded to diesel and electric multiple units, the country branches were stuck with antiquated steam engines and their threadbare coaches. Even getting electric lighting on the platforms instead of gas was a struggle. Continuing with old-fashioned systems kept these lines more labour-intensive than they could otherwise have been, which only widened the gap in profitability compared to the main lines. Speed was also an issue for a lot of country lines, particularly in pre-war times, due to the low power of the locomotives and the mixing of passengers with goods on stopping trains.

In contrast to a lot of books of this type, which only look at Great Britain, this one also includes sections set in Ireland. Mostly these serve to tell us how the Irish rural railways were even more spendthrift, disorganised and ramshackle than the English, Scottish and Welsh ones. Attention is drawn to the larger gauges on this island (standard 5’6” and “narrow” typically 3′) which further increased expenditure. Timekeeping too was even worse and page 141 has an amusing anecdote relayed from Punch wherein a local dignitary was surprise to see his train actually leaving on time, only to be informed that it was the train from the previous day.

Despite the myriad problems in running the railways, Thomas is keen to point out that the local communities held great affection for them, staging elaborate celebrations when they were opened and even grander funerals at their closure. That books such as this (and indeed films, magazines and television series) about old railways and the engines that ran on them are so numerous and constitute such a well-established genre is testament to the high regard in which the British hold at least the idea of the railways, even if in practice relatively few get to make regular use of them.

Rolling Coverage

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It quickly became apparent that the Duke of York’s dedication on 17th October to cease the use of his titles and honours was not enough to satisfy the public mood and so, not even a fortnight later, a further announcement was made that His Majesty would be taking measures to enact these changes in a formal way, and also that the changes would go further by removing his princely title as well so that he became Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. No notice to this effect has yet appeared in the London Gazette, but then it is fairly normal for that publication to lag by a few days and indeed for these processes themselves to take a few days to carry out. This is the first time since 1917 that a Prince of the United Kingdom has had that dignity removed in this way.

Less than a day after this announcement it was noted that the Roll of the Peerage had been updated to omit his name*. This is not actually a roll of parchment but rather a PDF. It is uploaded on and accessed through the website of the College of Arms but is actually controlled by the Ministry of Justice. As the page explains, the Roll was created as a government register of everyone who possessed a peerage of any rank of the United Kingdom or its predecessor states, the Roll of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal having been rendered quite inadequate for that purpose following the House of Lords Act 1999. Newly-created peers are added to the Roll automatically but those who have inherited their titles but those who inherit their titles are responsible for writing to the Secretary of State with the necessary documentation to prove their succession. It is also possible for those already listed to request their own removal. The absence of a peer from the Roll does not actually cause his peerages to cease to exist but does effectively mean that the state in its official capacity will cease to recognise him as holding them. This is probably as close as Andrew can get to fully giving up his dukedom and its subsidiaries without an Act of Parliament being passed specially for that purpose.

This has of course led to another flurry of edits on the former prince’s Wikipedia page. Some commentators noted how quickly the page had been moved from “Prince Andrew” to “Andrew Mountbatten Windsor“, but actually this was against procedure so the page name was reverted and not moved again until editor consensus was established. It would have been a lot more convenient for us if both of last month’s announcements had been made as one so that two separate page moves (and thus two separate discussions) would not have been needed. Of course, this still doesn’t entirely resolve matters because there is still some confusion as to whether “Mountbatten Windsor” needs a hyphen, as the royal warrant from 1960 includes one but the recent announcement does not. There is a further important, if largely academic, point to be made that even if Andrew has agreed to simply go by Mr from now on, he could still be called Sir until his knighthoods are fully removed, or indeed Lord as the younger son of a duke.

FOOTNOTES

*Contrast this version (archived on 16th December last year) to this one (archived yesterday): The first two pages list the principal peerages of members of the royal family, then the rest of the document lists all the non-royal peers. Within both groups the titles are listed alphabetically, so “York” was previously the last of the royals. Now he doesn’t appear at all. I note that the current version omits the “Latest revision” date underneath the Crown Copyright line on the first page, which makes me think that yesterday’s update was done in a hurry.

EXTERNAL LINKS

UPDATE (5th November)

The Gazette website has now published (as of noon today) notices confirming the removal of Andrew’s titles:

  • THE KING has been pleased by Letters Patent under the Great Seal of the Realm dated 3 November 2025 to declare that Andrew Mountbatten Windsor shall no longer be entitled to hold and enjoy the style, title or attribute of “Royal Highness” and the titular dignity of “Prince”.
  • THE KING has been pleased by Warrant under His Royal Sign Manual dated 30 October 2025 to direct His Secretary of State to cause the Duke of York to be removed from the Roll of the Peerage with immediate effect.

The first appears only in the London Gazette, while the second also appears in the Edinburgh and Belfast. So far I have not seen any of the usual experts dissecting these, although that will likely come in a few days. These are of course only the Gazette notices and not the full texts of the relevant documents, for which I have already seen some of them say they will file FOI requests. I will note that the removal of princely titles does not take the form of a royal licence, and refers to its target as already being named Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. The second, despite its triple publication, only refers to the Dukedom of York so the removal of the subsidiary earldom and barony must be read as implicit. It says that His Majesty directed the action rather than the Duke himself requesting it as the original warrant laid out, so presumably the new warrant must be amending the original in some way.

Miscellaneous Monarchical Minutiae

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Alright, I couldn’t find a more recent picture.

More from Torrance

In an update to my post from two days ago, I noted that Dr David Torrance had put out a research briefing for the House of Commons Library covering much of the same substance as I had. Today, hot off his own heels, he put out an “Insight” on the concept of Royal Warrants. It examines the distinction between Royal Warrants and Letters Patent, which has long been a source of confusion to me. The Insight covers some details about process and format, though any distinction in fundamental purpose is not resolved.

What struck me in both his recent updates were his repeated links to this site: the Corpus of British Administrative Instruments. This is a website by Jason Loch of Venerable Puzzle fame. I can’t work out how recent this is as Loch doesn’t mention the site on his aforementioned blog or on his Twitter feed. The Wayback Machine shows no records at all until today.

CBAI has a lot of overlap in principle with Heraldica, which I mentioned on Sunday, although a little more modern in terms of the coding and presentation. It collates the texts of reems of patents, warrants, ministerial letters and other documents of state and royal authority. The most fascinating part is that it includes photographs of these items as well. My favourite document so far is the patent from 12th April last year appointing Mark Scott as Somerset Herald. It features a delightful illustration by Timothy Noad of Charles III at his coronation.

Following on from the main thrust of yesterday’s article, a look now at the disused duke’s wife and daughters:

The Other Yorks

None of those called “The Yorks” actually use the word York in their names anymore.

Sarah Ferguson married The Prince Andrew in 1986. Their actual marriage did not last long as they separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996. Despite being separated almost thrice as long as they were married they still live together and often behave as if still a couple. As a wife she was “Her Royal Highness The Duchess of York” and subsequently she was “Sarah, Duchess of York” — the latter following the standard formula for how divorced former peeresses are styled, and also how wives of all royal peers are styled in biographical indexes as well as the titles of their Wikipedia articles (e.g. Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh, whose marriage is still going strong). There have been quite a few contexts, such as their daughters’ engagement announcements, in 2018 and 2019, where Palace communications have still referred to the couple together as “The Duke and Duchess of York”, probably because “His Royal Highness The Duke of York and Sarah, Duchess of York” would have looked a bit strange. Although there wasn’t a direct statement from her, news reports said that when Andrew had ceased use of the Dukedom of York Sarah had also ceased use of the courtesy title Duchess and had reverted to her maiden name. Talks are ongoing on both their Wikipedia pages as to how to present this. It would have been interesting to see what happened if a formal deprivation of the peerages had taken place, I’m not sure there is any precedent for whether the formally depriving a divorced peer of his peerage would automatically remove the courtesy title of his ex-wife as well.

Their daughters Beatrice and Eugenie also bear the title of Princess and the style of Royal Highness as children of a son of a sovereign per the 1917 letters patent. As is custom for second-generation descendants, they originally bore “of York” after their given names. We do not yet have a good custom for what to do when British princesses acquire commoner husbands: formally they are “Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrice, Mrs* Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi” and “Her Royal Highness Princess Eugenie, Mrs Jack Brooksbank”. In practice most references, and the names of their Wikipedia pages, omit anything after their first names. As with their father, this can be a little difficult for disambiguation**, as their have been other princes named Andrew (including his own paternal grandfather) and other princesses called Beatrice and Eugenie. This is also a problem for Princess Alexandra, originally “of Kent”, later “The Honourable Lady Ogilvy”. Even adding “of the United Kingdom” would not solve the problem in most of these cases, so either birth years are given in brackets or the living British one is given primacy over all others on the basis that they are overwhelmingly the most famous among current English-language sources.

Wrap-Up

In other news, His Majesty has recently appeared on another podcast. Not The King’s Music Room this time, but Unearthed with Cate Blanchett, looking at the progress of the Millennium Seed Bank. The Queen, meanwhile, has gotten herself written into the crime novel The Hawk is Dead by Peter James.

FOOTNOTES

*She might have been a Countess, but Edoardo’s comital title from the former Kingdom of Italy has no official recognition now.
**This is less of a problem for Anne, who also has the title Princess Royal.

UPDATE (31st October)

Loch has now put out a new post explaining the launch of the CBAI.

Depravity and Deprivation

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The Prince Andrew made a statement two days ago that, following discussions with the rest of the royal family, he will “no longer use my title or the honours which have been conferred upon me”. This is a press release rather than any formal instrument of law, so does not properly remove those from him, though a complete stripping away of said title and honours may be looming anyway. It is important to be aware of the principles and procedures involved here.

Removal of the Peerages

Andrew holds three titles in the Peerage of the United Kingdom — Duke of York, Earl of Inverness and Baron Killyleagh — which were conferred on him by Queen Elizabeth II. He has committed to ceasing all use of these titles whether in public or private context and so most if not all press and official sources will no longer use them when referring to him, but legally removing them is not easy. For almost a thousand years it has been the case that the reigning monarch (nowadays always on the advice of the Prime Minister) was broad prerogatives to hand out peerages at will, but not to then take them back again.

Some media sources are misusing technical terms here: The peerages are not “dormant” (which occurs when the incumbent dies and it is not clear who, if anyone, is the heir), nor “abeyant” (which is where the peerage allows succession to heirs female but without ranking them by primogeniture as the males are, so that inheritance is split between them). They are also not “extinct” or “reverted to the crown” (when the incumbent dies there is definitely no heir), nor “merged with the crown” (when the peer ascends to the throne). Probably the most appropriate term here is disused, for while Andrew legally still is Duke of York, he and everyone else will behave as if he isn’t.*

This video by Dr Allan Barton, writer of The Antiquary, explains most of the processes of removing peerages, which I will here summarise in textual form:

Recent Legislation

The Peerage Act 1963 provided, among other measures, for a person who has inherited a peerage within the last twelve months to disclaim it for his lifetime by writing to the Lord Chancellor. This is not relevant to Andrew’s situation as he has held his titles for over thirty-nine years and they were newly-created for him rather than inherited.

The House of Lords Reform Act 2014 allows peers to retire from Parliament at will, and also allows the Lord Speaker to expel members who are absent without leave for a whole session of six months or longer, as well as those who receive criminal convictions resulting in imprisonment for more than a year. The House of Lords (Expulsion and Suspension) Act 2025 further gives the House the power to vote out members who breach the code of conduct. Notably neither of these acts say anything about removing the titles of those affected, only their membership of the legislature. These are not relevant to Andrew’s situation either because his membership of the upper house was already terminated by the House of Lords Act 1999 and he was not one of the peers elected to stay on at the time nor has he contested any of the hereditary peer by-elections since then.

The Titles Deprivation Act 1917 allowed King George V to revoke British peerages from those whom a specially-appointed committee of the Privy Council had identified as aiding or supporting an enemy country in the First World War. This is probably the closest precedent for Andrew’s situation but still is not itself applicable as his alleged offences are not of the nature described therein, plus “the present war” as specified is one that ended more than four decades before his birth.

Earlier Legislation

In medieval and early modern times, a recurrent political weapon was the Act of Attainder. This was a special Act of Parliament which convicted and sentenced its target for a serious crime without the need for a trial in court. An attainted man lost all of his civil rights and his property was all forfeit to the state. If he held a peerage this was forfeit in the same way.

This was used regularly to punish peers who were political enemies of the monarch, especially if they had led revolts against him. There is precedent for this being used against members of the monarch’s own immediate family, most notably in 1478 when George Plantagenet was attainted and then executed for treason against his brother King Edward IV. He lost the dukedom of Clarence and all subsidiary titles, which his own son Edward of Warwick was then unable to inherit.** The last use of an act of attainder against a peer of the realm was in 1745, when several dozen people were convicted for the Jacobite uprising against King George II.

The procedure for attainder was abolished in the nineteenth century and Winston Churchill was dissuaded from attempting to revive it in the twentieth. The concept of convicting a person of a crime through the legislature rather than the courts was open to abuse for political purposes and is considered incompatible with modern conceptions of Human Rights, so its future usage is highly unlikely.

If the present Duke is to be properly deprived of his peerages, a bespoke new law will need to be devised.

Removal of the Knighthoods and Other Honours

Elizabeth II appointed her son a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1979, then promoted him to Knight Commander in 2003, then Knight Grand Cross in 2011. She also appointed him a Royal Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter in 2006.

Appointments to orders of chivalry are by the monarch’s letters patent, which can be cancelled and annulled by subsequent letters patent. Andrew’s knighthoods are both in orders under the monarch’s direct control rather than those subject to ministerial advice so I would logically assume that members can be removed (or, to use the technical term, degraded) at the monarch’s will as well, but this page on the Cabinet Office website is a little ambiguous.

Andrew was appointed a Grand Companion of the Order of Logohu in 2015. This order has the King of Papua New Guinea as sovereign and the Governor-General as Chancellor, but I haven’t so far found a source clarifying whether governmental advice is required for either appointment or removal.

Andrew also has a raft of military and commemorative medals, including the South Atlantic Medal for his service in the Falklands War. I haven’t looked up the rules of eligibility and forfeiture for all of these individually. His foreign awards (such as the Royal Norwegian Order of St Olav) are up to those countries to decide.

Removal of the Status of Prince

The dignity of Prince or Princess of the United Kingdom, along with the style of Royal Highness, is conferred by the sovereign either by letters patent or royal warrant and can be revoked by the same. François Velde of the website Heraldica has compiled the texts of all of these since 1864. It should be noted that, whereas the monarch himself has a distinct legal title in each of the Commonwealth Realms, the titles of the rest of the royal family only exist in the law of the United Kingdom and are recognised in the other realms by courtesy.

Removal from the Line of Succession

Per the Statute of Westminster 1931 any changes to the rules for succession to the throne must be agreed by all the Commonwealth Realms in unison. Per the Act of Settlement 1701 the Duke can remove himself from the line of succession by converting to Roman Catholicism. Perhaps that is something His Majesty can discuss with His Holiness at next week’s state visit.

Other Matters

The Order of Precedence in Scotland is determined by a royal warrant from 1905. That in England & Wales is based mainly on an ordnance by the Lord Chamberlain in 1595. These can be, and frequently are, amended in small ways by successive royal warrants to assign precedence to individuals and offices for which the original documents did not account. The King could likely revoke Andrew’s precedence as a brother of the monarch by this method.

The House of Lords Precedence Act 1539 (which per se only applies within the Lords chamber but in practice has been used as a basis for the order of precedence in England more widely) is primary legislation and would need another act of Parliament to change it.

Andrew is still eligible to be a Counsellor of State per the Regency Act 1937, as the Counsellors of State Act 2022 did not remove existing counsellors. His position as fourth adult in line to the throne will not change until Princess Charlotte has her twenty-first birthday in 2036. He could be ruled out early if he ceases to be a British subject and/or domiciled in the United Kingdom. Again, the only other way to remove him is by new primary legislation.

His precedence is largely an academic matter now that he is no longer attending even family events let alone public ones, and is fantastically unlikely to be called upon to attend a sitting of Parliament nor to sign state papers, but if there is to be a bill to remove his peerages then it would be fairly easy to tack on an extra couple of sentences dealing with these matters too.

I am a little uncertain as to the protocols around removing his naval rank, but it seems that, with the cooperation of the Admiralty Board, he can be permitted to resign his commission.

Before we get carried away with all of this, it is worth reminding ourselves of the state of limbo in which the addled prince currently lives — he has, after all, still yet to be convicted of, or even tried for, any crime, and in the future it may be considered by cooler heads that a bad precedent was set in such degradation based on the heat of public opinion.

Finally, spare a thought for Andrew Lownie, whose book is, much as I predicted, already seriously overtaken by events barely two months after publication. He’ll have to rush out a new edition next year, I suppose!

FURTHER READING

FOOTNOTES

*The closest parallel, though still quite weak, is how Queen Camilla was legally Princess of Wales from 2005 to 2022 but styled herself Duchess of Cornwall instead.

**As the attainder only applied to his father, he could still inherit the earldoms of Warwick and Salisbury from his maternal grandmother… but then in 1499 he too was attainted and executed for treason against King Henry VII. The latter title was restored in 1512 to his sister Margaret, but then she was attainted in 1539 and executed in 1541 for treason against King Henry VIII.

UPDATE (20th October)

Dr David Torrance has produced a briefing on this topic for the House of Commons Library. My FOI request to the Cabinet Office as to whether the Honours Forfeiture Committee’s remit includes those orders in the sovereign’s personal gift has been rejected.

Documentary Déjà Vu

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Last month was the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton & Darlington railway, the world’s first public railway to use steam locomotives. There have been quite a few commemorative events for this. The BBC has taken the opportunity to rerun a collection of some of their railway-related documentaries (not that they don’t have at least a handful of these at normal times anyway), which I have been watching on iPlayer over the last week or so.

When you watch a lot of documentaries about the same topic (e.g. railways, World War 2, the royal family, past general elections), especially if created by the same company, you will quickly notice a lot of repetition in what you’re being shown: You’ll notice the same stock film clips, the same talking points in the narration, the same talking heads being interviewed, the same background music being used. To some extent this is inevitable as, of course, they are all talking about the same event. Sometimes, however, the the resemblance is so specific as to be jarring.

Among the aforementioned documentaries were Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails, a standalone production, and The Last Days of Steam, an episode from series 8 of Timeshift. Both were originally aired in October 2008, the former on 2nd and the latter on 16th. When discussing the decline of the railways and the widespread adoption of the private motorcar, both show the same clip of a youngish couple in a red Austin-Healey roadster (registration 699 DON) driving on a motorway.

In Hislop’s documentary the clip starts at 39:19, accompanied by Terry Gourish, historian at LSE, saying

Well from the mid fifties things began to change. There was no fuel rationing affecting private motoring, road transport began to get a great impetus from new road-building, culminating in the first motorway, the M1, in 1959…

whereas in Timeshift‘s, it occurs at 41;30 as Jonathan Glancey, author of John Betjeman on Trains, says

The car from the mid-1950s was, apart from anything else, and beyond a means of transport, a consumer dream. It was something you could own. You can’t own a railway. A railway takes you where the railway goes. A care takes you, theoretically, where you want to go.

That the same clip should occur at almost exactly the same time in two documentaries produced by the same broadcaster a mere fortnight apart feels like a slight failure of quality control.

Some years ago I discovered the Railway Mania podcast series. Unfortunately that series has wound down a little recently, with just one new episode in almost a year. In its place I’ve recently turned to the Green Signals show, co-presented by Richard Bowker (former Chairman of the Strategic Rail Authority) and Nigel Harris, former editor of RAIL magazine. It’s a bit like the ex-politicians’ podcasts that have proliferated over recent years (e.g. Political Currency with Osborne & Balls) but more focused on industrial news.

Moving away from real railways, commemorations of the 80th anniversary year of The Railway Series continue. Today Historic England unveiled a blue plaque at 30 Rodborough Avenue in Stroud to mark that Wilbert Awdry had long ago lived there. The ceremony was attended by a group of his descendants. I was a little disappointed that so much of the news coverage identified him as the creator of Thomas the Tank Engine rather than of The Railway Series, including some incorrectly implying that the character debuted in 1945 rather than 1946. I also see that the display included a cardboard cut-out of the All Engines Go! version of Thomas himself, even though that series has been cancelled now and was generally disliked by most of the Awdry fandom. In some of the news videos a band outside can also be heard playing the Allcroft-era theme by O’Donnell & Campbell.

I also recently discovered that Thomas & Friends itself has an official 80th anniversary podcast. This is also includes many sound clips from the TV series. Curiously, the copyright notice credits the podcast to Gullane (Thomas) Ltd, showing that this company at least nominally still exists within the Mattel empire.

McFall Bows Out Early

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The Lord McFall of Alcluith has served as Lord Speaker since 2021. Today he announced in Parliament that he would be stepping down early because Lady McFall has Parkinson’s disease and he needs to spend more time caring for her. He has arranged for his successor to take office on 2nd February next year.

The office of Lord Speaker came into being as a standalone position as a result of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, having previously been one of many duties undertaken by the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain. According to Standing Order 18 (paraphrasing a little for simplicity):

  1. The first election of a Lord Speaker was held on 13th July 2011. Subsequently, elections shall be held in the fifth calendar year following that in which the previous election was held, on a day no later than 15th July in that year. A Lord Speaker elected under this paragraph shall take office on 1st September in the year of election.
  2. Where a Lord Speaker (including a person elected as Lord Speaker who has not yet taken office) dies, resigns or is deemed to have resigned, an election of a Lord Speaker shall be held within three months of the death, the giving notice of resignation or the deemed resignation. For the purposes of paragraph (1), this election is then “the previous election”.

The first Lord Speaker was the Helene, Baroness Hayman, who served from 4th July 2006 to 31st August 2011.

The second was Frances, Baroness D’Souza, who served from 1st September 2011 to 31st August 2016.

The third was Norman, Lord Fowler, who served from 1st September 2016 to 30th April 2021. He stepped down slightly early to focus on independent political campaigning.

The fifth, who has not yet been decided, will presumably serve from 2nd February 2026 to 31st August 2031.

It is a little strange to think that, despite the intention to have fixed term-lengths for the office, only one out of the first five incumbents has actually served the standard period on the Woolsack. McFall’s decision to leave office in February rather than much sooner is probably to allow the election of his successor to take place in January. If the election took place in December or November then the fifth Lord Speaker would only serve until August 2030, and thus every subsequent Lord Speaker election would be one year earlier than was originally intended. No candidacies have yet been declared for the forthcoming election.

Incidentally, Lady D’Souza has been in the news this week for almost the first time since her own speakership ended — she is facing an eight-week suspension from the House for using a Parliamentary letterhead when appealing speeding fines.

 

The Inbetweeners: A Potential Revival

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Even here I’ve managed to squeeze heraldry in. The shield of Rudge Park Comprehensive School is about as generic and uninspiring as you’d expect, but at least it conforms to the rules of heraldry unlike so many in real life. The blazon is most likely “Azure on a bend Argent three oak trees of the field”.

The Inbetweeners is a televisual franchise that can be considered, if not actually dead, then at least dormant, in as much as it’s been eleven years since the release of the second film and fifteen years since the end of the TV series. Neither the audience nor, it seems, the cast and crew, can entirely move on and yesterday there was an announcement that the four lead actors had signed up to a revival. Most of the news articles I could find were behind paywalls and those few which were readable still didn’t betray much in the way of detail despite about what form this new instalment would take. Presumably nothing of substance has been decided yet. From fans and commentators there is excitement, but also a lot of dread.

My academic cohort were a few years behind that of the character, and I think we discovered the program en mass around 2011-12* — after the series proper had ended but before we reached sixth-form ourselves. While the jokes (and indeed the catchphrases) circulated widely, I’m not sure it was ever regarded as more than fiction. Nobody saw it as a reflection of their own lives at the time, much less an aspiration for the future. A lot of cultural histories of this period refer to The Inbetweeners as the way sixth-form really worked for most people in Britain, in opposition to the fantasy version presented by Skins**, but curiously I don’t remember anyone at my school talking about Skins at all. As to whether it’s representative now, I’m obviously too old to say (and likely wasn’t qualified even back then), but I remember these articles from the end of the last decade noting how hard the format had proven to recapture.

Even so, we know we are in for some kind of comeback, and the scepticism of the long-time fans is well-founded as bringing back a property like this after such a long time always runs the risk of sullying rather than enhancing its reputation. Even this series’ own tenth anniversary special in 2018 was widely regarded as a damp squib. The problem most critical to a story of this kind is the age of the characters: Dawson Casting is routine for productions like this and right from the start the leads played characters a few years younger than themselves*** without straining credibility. Now, however, if you tried to pick up remotely close to where the second film left off they’d be about twice as old as the people they portrayed, and even with digital de-ageing it would be hard to pull off, with the added complication that the setting itself would have to be more than a decade in the past rather than contemporary^. Clearly, if the cast are to unite onscreen again, it would need to be in a “Where Are They Now?” sort of way, catching up with them at about age 35. This is tricky, as inevitably their situation in life will be very different, and that tends to cause existential problems for what is formally called situational comedy. Of course, other genres can also have this problem in their own ways, so here I will briefly change tack.

Dr Philippa Gregory has written a great many novels about English royal history, including a long string of them about the Plantagenets and Tudors. Starz has adapted some of these into TV series: The White Queen in 2013^^, The White Princess in 2017 and The Spanish Princess in 2019-20. TWQ covered the life of Elizabeth Woodville from 1461 to 1485, TWP followed her daughter Elizabeth of York until 1499. Gregory said that these parts of English history were underserved in mainstream fiction beyond Shakespeare, which may be correct. Season 1 of TSP was about the life of Catherine of Aragon from 1501-1509. This part could still qualify since Catherine’s time with Henry in their youth before their marriage broke down is also frequently neglected. When it was announced that TSP would get a second season, fans on their forums wondered just how long Starz intended to string this out, noting that the story couldn’t go much further before becoming a rehash of Showtime’s series The Tudors or myriad other productions including Gregory’s own The Other Boleyn Girl.

When it comes to this proposed revival, the comparison of which to be most wary is, of course, Peep Show, that other Channel 4 cult classic of the noughties. The exact diagetic timeline of that series is not always consistent, but the final episode has Jeremy turning 40 and the first series seems to have them both just shy of 30. The Inbetweeners, if renewed now, would land around the middle of this range. What’s more, a lot of the story ideas floated for the new script — whether by ordinary fans or by people connected with the franchise, feel very PS-esque: I saw musings about quirky flatshares, wedding disasters, failed partnerships and juxtaposed career outcomes. As I mentioned in last month’s post, PS had to end once the main characters got too old for the situation to continue, and any revival now would need to radically change its approach to adjust to the times. There might well need to be a new setting, and the characters to be written in a new way. This would also be the case for The Inbetweeners, and indeed more so given the even greater time gap both absolute and proportionate. It would not be possible to write the characters as the same personalities we remember from 2010, nearly half their lives ago. For sure, you could make arrested development an explicit feature of the story (as it also was on PS, and which would be entirely expected for at least two of the main four) but even then it would come off with a different tone.

My intention here is not to come of as overly pessimistic: I know from Futurama and Red Dwarf that an old franchise can be successfully brought back many times across several decades. It is eminently possible to get an interesting story out of a late sequel, albeit one which will need to be quite distinct from what was written the first time around and with the high risk that a large proportion of the audience will feel disgust at the outcome rather than delight. There is life here still, just not necessarily as we used to know it.

NOTES

*As the whole series ran to only eighteen episodes it was quite easy to finish the whole run on 4OD in a few days.
**I refer readers to this video essay by Stuart “Stubagful” Hardy, in particular where he says “I never got to live a life like the kids on Skins. Most of my teenage years consisted of being made to sit in a series of rooms with adults glowering at me… alright, a drama based on my teenage years probably wouldn’t have exactly made for a compelling piece of television but, in my defence, that was real! You people want real, don’t you.“ and, while it’s actually reviewing a completely different Channel 4 program, Charlie Brooker’s famous line in this Guardian article: “The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It’s easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It’s less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.”
***The four lead actors were born 1982-87 whereas the characters would have been born 1991-92 in order to start sixth-form in 2008.
^The second film already has this problem, being set in 2010-11 but made in 2014.
^^Co-production with the BBC.

Princes and Passports

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The King and the Prince of Wales made an unusual joint appearance on Thursday night – at a “Countdown to COP30” event at the Natural History Museum. I was a little perplexed to see them both getting out of the same car, given that security protocols often require the incumbent monarch and the heir apparent to travel separately. Perhaps that was itself an environmental statement, but in that case they surely would have turned up in His Majesty’s new electric BMW instead of the petrol-powered State Bentley. The limousine was, of course, displaying the undifferenced royal shield and banner.

Today the Home Office announced that British passports had been updated to, among other things, display Timothy Noad’s illustration of the British royal arms, replacing the old Reynolds Stone illustration as it has in so many other contexts. Stone’s illustration, at time of writing, still appears on Acts of Parliament.

In other heraldic news, it has been five months since the last newsletter by the College of Arms and six since the last blog post by the Heraldry Society. Still, at least there’s another virtual Oxford lecture coming up in a fortnight’s time!

Francium Decay

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It was announced today that Sébastien Lecornu was resigning as Prime Minister of France, having only taken up that office on 9th September. He hasn’t technically left office yet as he remains in a caretaker capacity until a successor can be found, but even if he lasts another three weeks like this his tenure will be shorter than Liz Truss’s in Britain.

Changing heads of government repeatedly in a short time is generally regarded as a symptom of a country’s political instability. I had a go at comparing France to some other countries — not all of them, obviously, nor is this sample chosen according to any particular principle — to see how bad things really are.

I think ten years is a long enough period from which to make a fair assessment, so I have listed all the people to have held the equivalent office in the period beginning 6th October 2015 and ending 6th October 2025. Dates of appointment are listed in brackets.

Nine

France

  1. Manuel Valls (31/03/2014)
  2. Bernard Cazeneuve (06/12/2016)
  3. Édouard Philippe (15/05/2017)
  4. Jean Castex (03/07/2020)
  5. Élizabeth Borne (16/05/2022)
  6. Gabriel Attal (09/01/2024)
  7. Michel Barnier (05/09/2024)
  8. François Bayrou (13/12/2024)
  9. Sébastien Lecornu (09/09/2025)

Six

Britain

  1. David Cameron (11/05/2010)
  2. Theresa May (13/07/2016)
  3. Boris Johnson (24/07/2019)
  4. Liz Truss (08/09/2022)
  5. Rishi Sunak (25/10/2022)
  6. Sir Keir Starmer (05/07/2024)

Five

Italy

  1. Matteo Renzi (22/02/2014)
  2. Paolo Gentiloni (12/12/2016)
  3. Giuseppe Conte (01/06/2018)
  4. Mario Draghi (13/02/2021)
  5. Giorgia Meloni (22/10/2022)

New Zealand

  1. John Key (19/11/2008)
  2. Bill English (15/12/2016)
  3. Jacinda Ardern (26/10/2017)
  4. Christopher Hipkins (25/01/2023)
  5. Christopher Luxon (27/11/2023)

Ukraine

  1. Arseniy Yatsenyuk (27/02/2014)
  2. Volodymyr Groysman (14/04/2016)
  3. Oleksiy Honcharuk (29/08/2019)
  4. Denys Shmyhal (04/03/2026)
  5. Yulia Svyrydenko (17/07/2025)

Four

Belgium

  1. Charles Michel (11/10/2014)
  2. Sophie Wilmès (27/10/2019)
  3. Alexander de Croo (01/10/2020)
  4. Bart de Wever (03/02/2025)

Three

Australia

  1. Malcolm Turnbull (15/09/2015)
  2. Scott Morrison (24/08/2018)
  3. Anthony Albanese (23/05/2022)

Canada

  1. Stephen Harper (06/02/2006)
  2. Justin Trudeau (04/11/2015)
  3. Mark Carney (14/03/2025)

Germany

  1. Angela Merkel (22/11/2005)
  2. Olaf Scholz (08/12/2021)
  3. Friedrich Merz (06/05/2025)

Israel

  1. Benjamin Netanyahu (31/12/2009 and 29/12/2022)
  2. Natfali Bennett (13/06/2021)
  3. Yair Lapid (01/07/2022)

Two

Luxembourg

  1. Xavier Bettel (04/12/2013)
  2. Luc Frieden (17/11/2023)

Russia

  1. Dmitry Medvedev (08/05/2012)
  2. Mikhail Mishustin (16/01/2020)

Spain

  1. Mariano Rajoy (21/12/2011)
  2. Pedro Sanchéz (02/06/2018)

The winner is Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, where Ralph Gonsalves has been Prime Minister since 29th March 2001.

As you can see, France is indeed doing rather badly in terms of minister retention. Britain isn’t exactly doing well either. I was a little surprised to see Australia, Canada and Germany all tied, given that the former is infamous for cycling its leaders and the latter respected for retaining them. Scholz has clearly let the side down by only lasting one term while Tony Abbot quit early enough to miss out on being counted here. Stephen Harper is only just barely included for Canada as the general election which would see him ousted was already ongoing.