The Spectator’s Notes | 9 May 2009

Thirty years, almost to the day, after we greeted our first woman Prime Minister, we greet our first woman Poet Laureate. Unlike Margaret Thatcher, who was careful not to press the sex point, Carol Ann Duffy describes her own appointment as ‘a historic day for women’. She says she wants 300 years of female poet laureates, to balance the past three centuries of males. She has lots of ideas about ‘the vocation of poetry’, and wants to use the laureateship to get her fellow poets into schools, preach about how homosexuality (she is a lesbian) is ‘a lovely, ordinary thing’ etc. I fear that the post may suffer from what economists call ‘producer capture’. Miss Duffy says that in her conversations with ministers and with Buckingham Palace, ‘I was told there was no expectation that I would write royal poetry.’ Why not? The Master of the Horse does not devote his time to promoting careers in horsemanship, but to the royal horses.