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Timothy Pitt-Payne's avatar

Thinking also about the symbolic (mild)humiliation that is inflicted on the victor, by requiring them to begin by visiting and acknowledging the monarch before they start governing. Some would read this as an outdated feudal hangover. More positively, I would suggest, it's a reminder both of the web of constitutional norms within which the successful party must operate, and of the truth that the victor must govern for the common good not simply for their own faction.

Blair in his memoirs records his impatience with all of this tradition and ceremony when he won the 1997 election. He wanted to get on with the business of governing.

Yeats is wiser here:

"How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?"

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