Letters | 21 March 2013

Joining the club

Sir: As Robert Hardman notes (Royal notebook, 16 March), not only is the C back in FCO but these days there is a waiting list of countries interested in joining, or being more closely associated with, the Commonwealth. I have a list of at least half a dozen, and even some strong signals from Dublin that they, too, are now thinking about joining the club. How can this be so when we were told so firmly by foreign policy experts in the past century that we should break our ties with the Commonwealth and that our future prosperity and destiny lay in Europe?

One reason is certainly that the Queen has kept the Commonwealth idea alive through years of British disinterest, remarking — with a prescience lacking in some of her then ministers — that it was becoming in many ways the platform of the future, as well as being the ideal soft-power network of the 21st century.