Westminster Abbey was a fitting setting in which to celebrate the life of Winston Churchill’s last child

The Times has given way to the Daily Telegraph as the bastion of the established order, for— with the one exception of the Prince of Wales and his wife — it listed the thousand or so people who attended last week’s memorial service for Lady Soames in Westminster Abbey in alphabetical order. This meant, for example, that my name, since it begins with C, came hundreds of places ahead of all the members of the Soames family, and even further ahead of the eighth Duke of Wellington, who is to be 100 years old next July.

On the other hand, the Daily Telegraph observed the traditional order of social precedence, starting with dukes and working its way down through the ranks of the aristocracy — marquesses, earls, viscounts, barons, and so on — before arriving at commoners like me. I don’t know for how long it has been the Times’s practice to deny priority to the titled in its reports of such occasions, but it suggests repudiation of the social pyramid on which the monarchy has traditionally perched, leaving it isolated above a sea of equals.