My Lords, I must apologise to the House that I was not able to take part at Second Reading. I was keen to be here but it was impossible. I warmly support the general purpose of the Bill, principally because I feel very strongly that the law which covers the Crown should have close parallel with those laws which cover the peerage. Now that the eldest female child of the Crown can inherit the Crown, I believe that we should move in the same way so far as the peerage is concerned. That is why I congratulate my noble friend Lord Lucas on aiming to do this. As he told us a few minutes ago, I approach this issue purely because of gender equality rather than because of all these quirks of the law about titles in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Those are mysteries to me; I am concerned with the gender equality aspects.
I said in an earlier intervention that we have to accept—I hope that my noble friend Lord Lucas and everybody else accepts this—that the chances of this Bill coming into law are nil. As the House may know, I had experience in another place as a party manager and a business manager. There is no way that the Bill will move into law and therefore, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, quite correctly said earlier, we ought to regard this as a discussion on this matter rather than a detailed way of passing it into law.