It has just been announced that after next year there will be no more presentation parties for debutantes to meet the Queen. The official explanation is that, though the Queen regrets having to stop something which is obviously popular, the number of girls applying (now about five to seven hundred each year) has grown so large that an extra presentation party would be needed and the pressure of her other engagements does not permit this. Instead, there will be more of those vast garden parties at Buckingham Palace to which as many as eight or nine thousand people from all walks of life are invited.
Pressure of time, then, is the official excuse; nothing about presentation parties being an undemocratic institution. But the newspapers, quite rightly, haven’t taken it like that. There has been an almost universal whoop of glee because this is another blow at what remains of the aristocracy and the cursed power of hereditary privilege.
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