My Lords, I am grateful to those who have participated in this short debate and apologise for the length of my opening remarks. However, this is an issue of profound potential importance, not only as it affects our country but the Queen’s realms as a
whole. It is inherent in the Perth agreement that we have an acquis agreed by all the realms, and no door should be left open to the crawling peg of equalities, rights and other challenge by a potential heir who is excluded from the Crown—as they feel, unfairly—against their rights by the existing deposit of the law.
I am not a lawyer, but I am concerned as an historian that the base of the law and the phrase “heir of the body” is a very ancient phrase which is buttressed only by the common law and the doubtful cover, in my view, of the clause from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act that I cited. I agree with the interpretation of my noble friend Lord Elton that that Act may be deficient in terms of providing protection for the Crown from the kind of challenge that might arise. My right honourable friend the Attorney-General made this point to me also, but I am afraid that I do not find full comfort in the remarks made by the Lord Chancellor at a time when the developments in the technology and science of birth and reproduction, and certainly the developments in the nature of the law of marriage, were far distant in the future and not necessarily conceived of. I say to the noble Baroness that this might be remote, but perhaps people thought before 1936 that certain things might be remote. It is the duty of Parliament, when legislating on something as grave as the succession to the Crown which Her Majesty holds on our behalf, to think about the future. It may, of course, be no more remote than that the child whom we all so fondly expect may be born gay.
I will return to the matter and would be grateful for further discussion with my noble and learned friend on the Front Bench to see if we cannot find a way of clarifying this. I am not going to go beyond the Perth agreement, but I think it is important that we have “awful clarity”—in the old language—on this very great matter. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.