Suddenly, the Chancellor has extra money to play with

Mr Len Cook lives with his wife in a flat near Victoria and can often be seen eating a modest lunch at Goya, a quiet family restaurant in Pimlico. In the evenings he is a keen theatregoer. Later this year he returns for good to his native New Zealand. In the meantime he faces two tasks, both of them daunting. The first is to secure the royal marriage of the Prince of Wales to Camilla Parker Bowles.

Mr Cook is the Registrar General. This means that he is in charge of marriage certificates. On Tuesday Len Cook ruled that the proposed civil marriage between Charles and Camilla was legal, dismissing 11 objections, one from a Church of England clergyman. It is 70 years since Stanley Baldwin maintained that the marriage between Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson was out of the question, and nothing in British law has changed since then. But Len Cook has saved the day through use of the Human Rights Act, hastily dismissed two years ago by Prince Charles as a ‘piece of politically correct interference’.