Republicans hate this. They tout arguments about the existence of a monarchy being a root cause of oppression, economic decline, and no doubt soon global warming, but still encounter an ocean of indifference among those of their audience who are not (their intelligence insulted) deeply hostile to them. We do not have a monarchy, let alone a constitutional monarchy, by accident. Decisions have been taken at certain times that we shall have one, and that it shall take the form it does. It is there, doing what it does, with the consent of the people. There is no mass movement against the institution precisely because it works, and works well.  Nor, indeed, do they seem to grasp the consequences of another glib suggestion that Mr Clegg has tossed into the constitutional vortex, namely that semi-salic law, which dictates the order of succession, should be abandoned and that the first-born child of any sovereign should succeed to the throne. Mr Clegg’s thinking is straightforward, though shallow. We live, thank heaven, in an age of equality between the sexes. He wants this equality to apply as much to the throne as it does to a woman having the right to a job as a hod-carrier. I am told that there are few building sites with women hod-carriers; and, oddly enough, such a monarchy would provide its own, metaphysical difficulties. It is not just that to change this law, which appears to be harming no one, requires the assent of 15 Commonwealth parliaments. It would also require the amendment of any number of our own Acts of Parliament to bring them into line. I am not sure whether these ramifications are understood by Mr Clegg. He did not seem to grasp, in the matter of Catholic spouses, whether he wanted to chop up the 1701 Act of Settlement, or the 1772 Royal Marriages Act, or possibly both. Then there is the precedent set for peerage law, entails to heirs male of the body, and so on and so forth. Pandora’s Box doesn’t even begin to describe it.  The media have often been blamed for creating instability in the Royal family, and rather a lot of that blame has been justified. I would not go so far as to say that some in my own trade had the blood of the late Diana, Princess of Wales on their hands, but it would not be too much of an exaggeration. The general public certainly have thought so, usually in those intervals between hysterically blaming the House of Windsor for her premature and lamented demise. The manipulation of public opinion concerning the institution of our Head of State is a dangerous business. Newspaper and magazine editors and others in comparable positions in the broadcast media are not always perhaps so conscious of their responsibilities in this area as they should be. I fervently hope that Catherine Middleton is left alone in her private life in the way that her fiancé’s mother was not. But the media are not the main problem for the Royal family: the Queen’s ministers are.  It should not take too much wit for those ministers to understand two important points. First, there is no threat of the public withdrawing their consent from the monarchy, or showing any dissatisfaction with it as it is currently constituted: so there is no cause for politicians to start to interfere with it. Second, the public do not mind that this unique institution is configured in certain unique ways, such as having a Protestant succession, or following semi-salic law – so the politicians, who appear to have other, much graver issues with which to deal, should perhaps shut up and move quietly away.  Any attempt to change the nature of the monarchy would gratuitously weaken it. That is why the Prince of Wales must succeed his mother when the time comes (abdication either by her, or by him in favour of Prince William, would undermine the whole concept of monarchy); he is in any case far more popular with the public than some can bear to admit, as is his entirely harmless consort. Would we rather have a political head of state, such as President Obama or President Sarkozy, both of whom now polarise opinion in their respective countries to a destabilising extent? Would we like the opportunity to have Chris Patten, who seems to have the reversion on all top public sector jobs these days, as our own Head of State? Or, better still, Neil Kinnock? That is where monkeying around with the monarchy would take us, and why we should be thankful indeed for what history has so wisely given us.
Ministers who want to change the nature of our constitution don&rsquo;t grasp the    consequences, writes Simon Heffer.