The Spectator’s Notes | 6 December 2012

You will have read in every news outlet that the baby whom the Duchess of Cambridge is bearing will be third in line to the throne if she is a girl, because of a new law which equalises the succession of the firstborn between males and females. This is untrue — first because, as the child of the heir to the heir, she will be third in line to the throne under existing law (unless a brother comes along), and secondly because this new law does not exist. All that has happened is that the Commonwealth prime ministers of the 16 countries of which our Queen is Queen agreed in Perth in 2011 that they wanted this change. Under the Statute of Westminster, no change can happen without the legislative agreement of all. They therefore set in train a means of co-ordinating this. By a genuine coincidence, the last consent came through on Monday, just before anyone in government knew about the royal pregnancy.