Sadly it turned out to be no more than a seven-day wonder. On April 20 Vera Baird, the solicitor general, appeared entirely definite. The assumption in our law of succession that a man trumps a woman, that a younger son should take the throne ahead of an older sister, was a "load of rubbish", and the government was about to sweep it away.

Few declarations by a minister in the course of Gordon Brown's premiership can have commanded such backing. A poll for the Daily Telegraph found 78% in favour of change and a mere 12% defending the present arrangements - arrangements which may have made sense in times when Henry V stiffened English sinews on the eve of Harfleur, but today are simply a picturesque but indefensible hangover. It is even known that the Queen is sympathetic - this was ascertained when the Conservative peer Jeffrey Archer introduced a bill to just this effect a decade ago. It is hardly surprising that the Queen should approve of such a move. She is no second-best monarch. Even open-minded republicans acknowledge she has served Britain well. Yet had she had a brother, she would not have been permitted to do so.

Just as a man trumps a woman in the law of succession, so an attorney general trumps a solicitor general, and last week Ms Baird's superior, Baroness Scotland, ruled out any immediate change. There will still be a single equality bill drafted this year, but this reform won't be in it. Not that Lady Scotland ruled out reform altogether; it was the timescale that worried her. Changing the law would be complex; it would mean the repeal or amendment of much other legislation. And the Commonwealth would have to be asked. All of which may be true, but one might have thought that only a government exclusively manned by reactionary Tories would have left it at that. The arguments marshalled against this change endearingly echo those summoned up by diehards in the face of other necessary, belated and soon uncontroversial reforms, from the 1832 reform bill through the battles over votes for women to the end of the all-hereditary and almost all-male House of Lords. Tamper at your peril, they say. You risk disturbing that delicate balance on which our national welfare depends.

There are factors here that go beyond the mere dictates of logic. Warning against such a change, the historian Andrew Roberts quoted Bagehot's warning against letting daylight in upon magic. Perhaps that is why such a necessary and healthful change is so feared in such quarters: the more you let in the daylight, they calculate with a shudder, the more people may wonder what logical case can be made for keeping kings and queens in the 21st century.