Learn from Elizabeth I, Cameron: a named successor is a shroud

As Fraser Nelson says on this morning’s Spectator podcast, David Cameron will likely be regretting yesterday’s announcement for the rest of his premiership. He’s not a ripe watermelon; highlighting that he has a best before date won’t encourage anyone to eat him now, before he grows mould.

Worse, he’s announced a shortlist of three possible successors: ‘the Theresa Mays, and the George Osbornes, and the Boris Johnsons’. We all know the troubles a similar announcement caused Tony Blair, but even if Dave managed to sleep through the Blair-Brown years (from the opposite green benches), dipping into the biography of any pre-modern English monarch should have taught him of the dangers of naming a successor. Elizabeth I wouldn’t even name a successor on her deathbed. Under absolute monarchs, even speculating about the eventual death of a monarch was an act of treason – Elizabeth herself got into hot water, as merely the heir to the throne, when it was alleged she’d hired the occultist John Dee to cast Mary I’s horoscope.