This session of parliament is due to end between 29 April and 6 May. Now the government is desperate for an Order in Council to kill it off by 9 a.m. on the 29th to avoid another painful Prime Minister’s Questions. The parliament that reassembles for the King’s Speech on 13 May could hardly, in theory, look more like what Sir Keir Starmer wants. His party has the largest overall majority since 2001. He will have jettisoned all hereditary peers.
Why, my sharp-minded colleague Tom Utley once asked after a Telegraph Christmas Carol service, should anyone think God would abhor the Virgin’s womb? He was talking about the line in ‘O come, all ye faithful’ that goes: ‘Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb.’ Wasn’t it a bit weird? At last I found the answer in a book, Redeemer in the Womb, by the theologian John Saward, which brilliantly explores the unusual subject of what writers in the early Church thought about the months spent by Jesus in the Virgin Mary’s womb. A pagan presumption in the ancient world was that women’s insides were nasty and shameful.
