Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Tapsell Excerpts

Tuesday 20th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

One Member of this House on the other side of the planet is, I think, enough. I do not intend to take a long voyage myself, although I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his kind suggestion. Thankfully, we do not need to travel around the globe to communicate with each other these days. We have other means by which we can liaise with colleagues and friends in the New Zealand Government—and indeed, with the other realms. As I have said before, I am as impatient as the right hon. Gentleman to see the end of the outdated and discriminatory rule of male primogeniture and also the bar on the monarch or the successor to the throne marrying a Roman Catholic. I am as anxious as the right hon. Gentleman is to see those rules updated and modernised. It just takes a bit of time and a little bit of patience to make sure that all the realms are properly aligned, as they need to be to make this change happen.

[Sir Peter Tapsell (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)]

Will the Deputy Prime Minister—and the Prime Minister of New Zealand—bear in mind that, but for our law of male primogeniture, the German Kaiser would also have become King of England, which would have produced almost as interesting a coalition as the present one?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

We always rely on my right hon. Friend for such erudition and grasp of history, which he possesses but unfortunately I do not. I am grateful to him for pointing that historical quirk out to us, but I hope he will agree that that is not reason enough not to modernise the rules of succession and bring them into line with the 21st century.