Stop! Wait, Wait A Minute, Mr Postman

Thanks to the latest EU-caused postal strike, both The Spectator and The Catholic Herald did not arrive until this morning.

The Spectator, which must of course have gone to print through the week, contained Geoffrey Wheatcroft's review of Richard Milhous Nixon, by one Conrad Black. I am not going to write anything about Black, who has lodged an appeal. But I love that single l in Milhous, and the lack of an e and the end. It is always amusing to be reminded of the contrast between who the American elite think that they are (or like to pretend that they are), and who they really are. How Donald Rumsfeld must have hated it when Europeans, without any self-consciousness, pronounced his surname with a soft d. Just think of Janet Weiss in The Rocky Horror Show, insisting that her name is "Wice", not "Vice".

Or just think of the quite regular newspaper "discovery" of some or other more-or-less Nazi relative of the Royal Family, although they, of course, have never made any effort to hide their background. What would have been the point? The real reason that Diana and her lot hated and hate them, far from being anything to do with "The People's Princess", was and is because she married down, from one of the great noble houses of England (the one, in fact, that bankrolled the monarchy for part of the eighteenth century), into what those houses, and their closely related Scottish counterparts, regard as parvenues, nouveaux riches and immigrants, an unfortunate political necessity at a particular time. Middle Britain should always have loved them a great deal more than it loved Diana and the Spencers.

Which brings me to The Catholic Herald, and to a column by Stuart Reid (Deputy Editor of The Spectator, as it goes), rightly pointing out that the Act of Settlement is good for us, because it reminds us that we are different, and because it does us the courtesy of taking our beliefs seriously by identifying them as a real challenge. Quite so.