Everyone seems to agree that it is better for royal personages to be open if they have cancer. It helps thousands of other sufferers and their families. But nowadays sheer necessity is part of it: the omnipresent video evidence of the monarch’s daily life makes it unavoidable that people will notice physical changes. This applies to our present King. In her recent biography, George VI and Elizabeth, Sally Bedell Smith gives an excellent account of the illness of George VI, which probably began in 1949 and killed him in February 1952. Even in those days, people did begin to notice. She quotes Harold Nicolson, as early as March 1950, hearing from Paddy Leigh Fermor that the King, at an investiture, had to be ‘heavily made up with sun tan and rouge’ to conceal the pallor of the invalid. The following year, Princess Elizabeth led the Sovereign’s Parade on a horse called Winston, because the sovereign himself, her father, had cancelled his public engagements for six weeks. In early September, the doctors reversed their previous belief that the King did not have cancer. They did not tell the King or his family, but they thought his illness merited a public bulletin. It said his left lung had undergone ‘structural changes’. Why, Winston (the statesman, not the horse) asked his own doctor, Moran, while they are at cards in Chartwell. (He had to ask his doctor because, at that point, he was leader of the opposition, with no access to official secrets.) ‘Because,’ Moran told him and recorded in his diary, ‘they were anxious to avoid talking about cancer.’ ‘“But why?” he persisted.’ The answer was complicated – partly a prevailing inhibition about talking about cancer when it was so rarely curable, but also because of delicacy about the sovereign’s life. As Churchill himself said to Moran: ‘Under the Constitution, the duty of the King’s doctors is to prolong his life as long as possible.’ It remains a crime to ‘compass the death of the Sovereign’, meaning simply to imagine it, the reason being that such talk often had treasonable intent. To a monarchist like Churchill, as Moran put it: ‘The demise of the sovereign seemed like a revulsion of nature.’

Today, we think we don’t think like this, but perhaps we do, a bit. Being ‘open’ is not a straightforward thing. As well as considerations of privacy, tricky calculations must be made about the effects of public announcement. Will it worry people too much, or even too little? Will it cause authority to drain away from a man who might recover fully and reign for many years? Might serious illness affect other things? In 1951, there was a possibility that the King’s illness might delay the general election (in fact, it went ahead and Churchill won it). Today, election timing will not be completely absent from minds in Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street. There is no definitely correct way of dealing with this problem, so the Palace’s announcement on Monday is better seen as a holding position rather than the last word.

SUV stands for Sports Utility Vehicle. They can have little sports utility in big cities, so my inner puritan makes me slightly sympathetic to policies which discourage them there. But the Paris referendum on the subject last Sunday is interesting. Fifty-five per cent voted to support the policy of the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, to triple SUV parking charges. In the central arrondissements, a six-hour stay will cost €225. But what was really striking was the turnout – only 5.7 per cent – and the loaded wording of the question, which was, ‘For or against the creation of a specific rate for the parking of heavy, bulky, polluting individual cars?’ I was also surprised to see on France 24 that supporters of the change were interviewed inside a polling station, something which British law forbids. Is it a usefully democratic process if a tiny minority of a metropolitan population can vote to bring in what is, in effect, a tax on an even smaller minority (SUV owners)? Any great city will contain 200,000 people who will happily turn out to vote for a charge which they can be certain they will not pay themselves.

Why is the word ‘equity’ now so widely applied? As I write, I have just heard it deployed by someone complaining about the lack of NHS dentists. It is a fine word, a bridge between justice and fairness, but it is devalued if sprayed around. In England, equity means a form of law developed to uphold the rules of ‘natural justice’ (itself an exact phrase concerned with just process rather than with vaguer notions about what seems naturally just). Johnson’s dictionary defines equity, in this sense, as ‘The rules of decision observed in Chancery, as distinct from the literal maxims of law’. Since the 1870s, this has been expanded so that all the branches of the High Court administer both law and equity. ‘Equity’ can also mean ownership, as in ‘a slice of the equity’ in a company. Perhaps it is for these reasons that the left now politicises the word: it sounds a bit like ‘equality’, it implies a right under law and it hints at material benefit. 

Recently, I told a fellow sexagenarian how I had entered one of the grandest stationery shops in London, asked for a blotter and been met with blank looks. My friend was easily able to cap this story. He had invited a former high-level government policy adviser to lunch at his very well-known London club. His guest was late, having never heard of his club and gone instead to a hotel of the same name. He finally arrived, tieless. The club produced a tie. My friend’s guest had never worn such a garment and did not know how to tie it. We laughed, of course, at the strange state of the world thus evidenced, but I realise that many reading this Note will laugh at us for being stuck in the pre-Blair era before Things Could Only Get Better.