A Greenwich reader of Victorian comedy reads about Prince William’s three personalised number plates and turns to Gilbert and Sullivan’s merciless song about hereditary rank
Monday, 26 October 2026. Greenwich, South East London. The upper deck of a Thames Clipper heading west to Embankment, grey water, a vocal score of Iolanthe on my knee and my husband humming the wrong song beside me, 6.10pm.
Three Plates For A Patient Heir
The London Prat reports that Prince William has ordered three personalised number plates: NOTYET for the Aston Martin, because he is waiting to be King; NOTHARRY for the Range Rover, because he is avoiding his brother; and DISTASTEFUL for the Bentley, because he disapproves of almost everything. The throne, the piece notes, cannot become vacant through retirement, redundancy, poor performance or an unfavourable appraisal. The Prince has been on the management training programme since birth.
My husband and I are going to see an amateur production of Iolanthe tonight, in a church hall near the Strand, which is the most Victorian sentence I have written all year. I read the Prat piece on the boat and thought that Gilbert would have written a patter song about it before the clipper reached Tower Bridge.
A Fairy Opera About The House Of Lords
Iolanthe, first performed at the Savoy Theatre in 1882, is Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera about fairies and the House of Lords. Strephon, a young shepherd, is half a fairy, the son of a mortal man and the fairy Iolanthe, who has been banished from fairyland for marrying him. Strephon wants to marry Phyllis, a ward of the Lord Chancellor, but she is also courted by the entire House of Peers, who process onto the stage in full robes to the most magnificent march Sullivan ever wrote.
When the Peers oppose Strephon, the Fairy Queen takes revenge by making him a member of Parliament and arranging for every bill he proposes to pass. Among them is a bill to open the peerage to competitive examination. The Peers are horrified. The idea that rank might be awarded on merit is, to them, the end of civilization.
Nothing In Particular, Very Well
The opera’s most famous song is sung by Lord Mountararat, who explains the role of the House of Peers in British history. During the great wars against Napoleon, he says, the House of Peers made no pretence to intellectual eminence or scholarship sublime, and yet Britain won the war at Waterloo. The refrain is the cruellest line in Victorian comedy: the House of Lords did nothing in particular, and did it very well.
That line is NOTYET, set to music. The report’s joke is that the heir to the throne holds a job without duties, waiting for a vacancy that only arrives by death. Gilbert’s joke is that hereditary rank is an honour for doing nothing, and that the Peers are perfectly content with the arrangement. Neither joke is about a bad person. Lord Mountararat is genial and harmless. So, by every account, is the Prince. The comedy is in the system, which rewards waiting and calls it duty.
An Indian Echo
The Indian side of my reading has its own hereditary waiting rooms. In the nineteenth century, the British in India maintained hundreds of princely states, ruled by maharajas, nawabs and rajas whose thrones were guaranteed by the colonial government in exchange for loyalty. Many of these rulers had very little power and enormous ceremony. They waited, often for decades, for the British Resident’s approval of everything from their marriages to their budgets. Under the Doctrine of Lapse, a policy pursued vigorously by Lord Dalhousie in the 1840s and 1850s, a state without a natural heir could be annexed. Waiting for an heir became a matter of political survival. Gilbert never wrote about India, but he would have recognized a throne whose holders did nothing in particular, under supervision.
Gilbert, for the record, was not a revolutionary. He was a comfortable, prosperous, rather conservative man who was knighted in 1907, long after Sullivan. His teasing of the Peers was affectionate, not abolitionist. That is perhaps why it has lasted. Audiences of every political persuasion can enjoy Lord Mountararat, because he is not a villain. He is simply a very pleasant man doing nothing, with a magnificent march to accompany him. The NOTYET plate has the same quality. Nobody is angry with the Prince. Everybody is amused by the arrangement.
The Clipper Docks
We are passing the Tower of London, lit up and solemn. My husband has now moved on to humming the Peers’ march, correctly this time, and an American couple across the aisle have asked whether it is the national anthem. He told them it might as well be. They took a photograph of the Tower and asked whether the King lives there. I said no, but his ravens do. They seemed satisfied.
The Church Hall
The production tonight will have twelve Peers in robes made from charity shop curtains, a Fairy Queen who is, I am told, a retired headmistress from Lewisham, and an orchestra of nine. It will be wonderful, because amateur Gilbert and Sullivan always is. The Peers will process in, and the audience will cheer, as audiences have for a hundred and forty years, at a song that tells them their aristocracy is useless. Then everybody will go home and nothing will change. That, too, is very British. Gilbert knew it. The NOTYET plate knows it. I keep a log of such evenings on the War Room site, where the politics are louder than any opera, and considerably less tuneful.