| I blow hot and cold on this stuff, and at a small private dinner at Buckingham Palace a while back I rather enjoyed being the only mister at a tableful of princes, dukes, earls, viscounts, barons, and knights. But on balance I think I prefer a straightforward upfront knighthood to the American practice of turning temporary office into lifelong title. It creeps me out a little when you've got, say, a Republican primary debate between Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich and it's all "Governor Romney", "Senator Santorum" and "Mr Speaker", even though none of 'em has been a governor, senator, speaker or anything else since the turn of the century. Furthermore, titles such as "Governor" and "Senator" are in the gift of the people, who confer them only for a limited time. It's an unseemly act of usurpation to appropriate them as personal prenominals. There's no point forbidding, as the US Constitution does, titles of nobility if you turn a two-year congressional term from the mid-Seventies into a lifelong aristocratic rank. |