As it is, boxed in by his own decision to prepare everything for going early, he's pushed all the time to talk something like the same language of veto and national sovereignty as John Major. That, too, may be a given of modern political life. The power of the British media tends to ensure that the government thinks it has to be campaigning for survival all the time. But the scenes in the throne-room of the Lords yesterday were especially unhappy. Somehow they debased both the government and the Queen.
Ministers embrace the flummery with evident pleasure, but also with calculation.
The Queen, unvoted and unvoting, is their electoral creature. And in six months' time, the Lord Great Chamberlain will be hoisting on the ermine all over again.