It may be the right one but it has to be a shared one

It may be the right one, but it has to be a shared one.But how can it be shared when Parliament is not even allowed to debate the monarchy, supposedly on the grounds that it is the Queen's own court? This is the real issue of sovereignty; not this or that reform of the rules defining the Royal Family, but how we decide how the rules are changed.It matters for ministers, as they exploit prerogative powers, now that the informed constraints of consensus politics have been broken. A Tory leak seems to have inspired Saturday's Daily Express story, sensationally headlined: "The Queen's secret inquiry into Labour". This revealed that her private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, is conducting discreet interviews to consider the effect on the monarchy of Lords reform, while its editorial proclaimed: "The British constitution is a .. delicate edifice .. tamper with several parts of it .. as Labour intends ... and you may unwittingly unravel the whole thing."Her Majesty is being enlisted to preserve us from decentralisation, a modest Scottish parliament and a Freedom of Information Act.

If the monarchy collaborates with this approach, however surreptitiously, it could indeed help John Major win in 1997.But such a short-term reprieve is likely to precipitate a constitutional endgame from which it is inconceivable that the Crown will emerge unscathed. Ironically, it is in the monarchy's interests also that we move away from Lord Blake's talk, Sir Robert's discreet soundings and Tory scaremongering As well as ours. For until the monarchy can be properly debated it will be hard to describe ourselves as a democracy.The writer is the editor of 'Power and the Throne' (Vintage, 1995).. He made quite a spectacle, the outsider with the strange, short clothes, tagging along in the high African grass, repeating his exasperated questions to the men hurrying to their midday chicken oracle.

It was wrong to think that they were primitive or foolish, of course - all those commemorative rituals at his public school for the massed slaughter of the recent First World War had shown up that presumption - but what they had told him of their society was certainly not making his task any easier It seemed a world expressly designed by lunatics. Everyone believed there were witches around, and that to find out if someone else was bewitching you, you needed to feed poison to a chicken while going through the name of possible suspects, and when the chicken fell over dead, you knew who it was. Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard pushed along to catch up with these men he'd come to like, and helped them set out the nervously flapping fowls in the growing heat. It still seemed impossible, though, for poisoned chickens can't talk. He thought about it at length back in the house he'd had built in the village.What if the whole thing was just a way of channelling a small community's tensions? It wouldn't matter which name the chicken fell over at. You'd be happy - and tension in the village would be reduced - if anyone on that list apologised to you.Everything that had seemed odd about these people clicked into place.