Dear Giles Brandreth
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Your support makes all the difference.Until now your career has been pretty admirable. You've made money out of entertaining and sometimes educating people. You deserve congratulations for getting a job I have coveted since unwrapping my first Ludo set - a directorship of JW Spear, producer of Scrabble.
But it's one thing to devise crazy puzzles and edit joke books, and another, when you're an MP, to turn fun ideas into law. And yet that's what you're doing by introducing a Private Member's Bill which will mean that civil weddings won't have to take place in register offices: couples could be married wherever they like, from castles to hotels.
On the surface, it seems an extension of what you've been doing all along - spreading a little happiness around, in the same way as you set a kissing record by snogging Cheryl Baker of Bucks Fizz for three minutes and 22 seconds on telly. Anyway, why shouldn't people get married where they like? Well, no reason, except that by making marriage easier your Bill will have wider repercussions than you imagine.
When one in three marriages end in divorce, you're proposing to make it even less formal than it already is. And even more trivial. OK, you could argue that no couple wants to trail off to a dingy office to be faced with a boot-faced registrar who only turns to them when he's finished filing the latest death certificate.
In the Seventies we used to say that marriage was 'just a bit of paper'. But at least to get the piece of paper you had to sign on in the same place that those other two important life-events were registered - deaths and births. Take the marriage out of the register office and you are, in effect, saying that it is not as important as birth or death.
Today the Marriage Bill; tomorrow people could get married in a House of True Love by an Elvis look-alike registrar. A couple recently celebrated their wedding with a bungee jump - and presumably were your Bill to be passed there would be nothing to prevent a registrar springing after them to perform the necessary while dangling from another rubber band.
It looks suspiciously as if your aim is to make a mark in Parliament with an opportunistic, people-pleasing idea as a kind of warm-up act to your political career. When you became an MP the idea was that you would take a change of direction. Become a bit more serious. Address important issues. And what do you give us? The Marriage Bill.
There are much more important issues about marriage that need addressing these days. Should marriage be made far more difficult, in order to give it some credibility? Or should divorce be made more difficult - if there are children involved? Should we be thinking of other kinds of contracts, now that marriage is going out of fashion? As an MP, you could do better than the Marriage Bill. I think, actually, that as a director of Spear's you could do better than that, too.
(Photograph omitted)
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